The present systematic review and meta-analysis about the accuracy of diagnostic tests aim to describe the findings of literature over the last thirty years for the diagnosis of Chagas disease (CD). This work aimed to determine the accuracy of diagnostic techniques for CD in the disease’s acute and chronic phases. The PubMed database was searched for studies published between 1990 and 2021 on CD diagnostics. Fifty-six published studies that met the criteria were analyzed and included in the meta-analysis, evaluating diagnostic accuracy through sensitivity and specificity. For Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA), Fluorescent Antibody Technique (IFAT), Hemagglutination Test (HmT), Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), and Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (qPCR) diagnosis methods, the sensitivity had a median of 99.0%, 78.0%, 75.0%, 76.0%, and 94.0%, respectively; while specificity presented a median of 99.0%, 99.0%, 99.0%, 98.0%, and 98.0%, respectively. This meta-analysis showed that ELISA and qPCR techniques had a higher performance compared to other methods of diagnosing CD in the chronic and acute phases, respectively. It was concluded utilizing the Area Under the Curve restricted to the false positive rates (AUCFPR), that the ELISA diagnostic test presents the highest performance in diagnosing acute and chronic CD, compared to serological and molecular tests. Future studies focusing on new CD diagnostics approaches should be targeted.

The present systematic review and meta-analysis about the accuracy of diagnostic tests aim to describe the findings of literature over the last thirty years for the diagnosis of Chagas disease (CD). This work aimed to determine the accuracy of diagnostic techniques for CD in the disease's acute and chronic phases. The PubMed database was searched for studies published between 1990 and 2021 on CD diagnostic. Fifty-six published studies that met the criteria were analyzed and included in the meta-analysis, evaluating diagnostic accuracy through sensitivity and specificity. For Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA), Fluorescent Antibody Technique (IFAT), Hemagglutination Test (HmT), Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and (Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction qPCR diagnosis methods, the sensitivity had a median of 99.0%, 78.0%, 75.0%, 76.0% and 94.0%, respectively; while specificity presented a median of 99.0%, 99.0%, 99.0%, 98.0% and 98.0%, respectively. This meta-analysis showed that ELISA and qPCR techniques had a higher performance compared to other methods of diagnosing CD in the chronic and acute phases, respectively. It was concluded by means of the AUC restricted to the false positive rates, that the ELISA diagnostic test presents the highest performance in diagnosing acute and chronic CD, compared to serological and molecular tests. Future studies focusing on new CD diagnostics approaches should be targeted.

Review question / Objective: The objective of the current work is to systematically review and summarize the available literature on the diagnostic accuracy of diagnostic tests for Chagas Disease. Eligibility criteria: The studies were selected in three stages. In the first, non-English language articles, duplicate articles, reviews, and meta-analyses were excluded, only articles published after 1990 and conducted on humans were included. In the second stage, the titles and ab-stracts of the articles selected through the search strategy were examined. Finally, the highly relevant full studies were retrieved and separated from the articles with a title or abstract that did not provide sufficient data to be included.