The purpose of the study was to compare the sensitivity and specificity of AdenoPlus with viral polymerase chain reaction (PCR) at detecting adenoviral conjunctivitis in patients with recurrent conjunctivitis (group a), conjunctivitis not responding to treatment (group b) or those where the cause for conjunctivitis was not clinically apparent (group c).

This was a prospective study of 27 patients who presented to the acute eye clinic with conjunctivitis as described above. They had AdenoPlus and viral PCR done. Patients with clinically diagnosed adenoviral conjunctivitis were excluded.

Of the 27 patients, 2 patients (7%) belonged to group a, 5 patients (19%) in group b and 20 patients (74%) in group c.

Two patients (7%) in group c, showed positive result for both tests. Four patients (15%) showed positive result for viral PCR, but negative for AdenoPlus of which 2 patients belonged to group b and 2 in group c. One patient was positive with AdenoPlus but negative on PCR, however there was a delay in sending the PCR. This patient had recurrent conjunctivitis (group a). The remaining 20 (74%) were negative for both.

Compared with PCR, AdenoPlus showed a sensitivity of 33% (2/6) and specificity of 95% (20/21), a negative predictive value of 83%, a positive predictive value of 67%, and overall agreement of 81%(22/27).

The results of our study show, although AdenoPlus has got a very high specificity, its sensitivity is very low in these groups of patients and hence does not have a role as a screening tool in the acute eye clinic set-up for their initial management.