Abstract. During the course of chronic chagasic infection, low parasitemia levels prevent parasite detection by current techniques such as hemoculture and xenodiagnosis. Since serologic tests have sensitivity but lack specificity, molecular assays based on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) have been proposed as alternative tools for parasite detection in individuals with chronic Chagas' disease. A variable degree of PCR efficiency has been reported in the literature and illustrates the need for further evaluation of large numbers of chagasic patients. In this study, we compared an optimized PCR technique with hemoculture and complement-mediated lysis (CoML) in 113 individuals from or living in endemic areas of Brazil who had conventional serologic results that were either positive, negative, or inconclusive. The PCR amplification yielded positive results in 83.5% (66 of 79) of individuals with positive serology, 47.6% (10 of 21) with negative serology, and 46.2% (6 of 13) with inconclusive serology. Of 10 patients with negative serology and positive PCR result, eight (80%) had positive CoML, indicating that they could have been chagasic but were not mounting immune responses. The PCR results were also positive for all individuals who had positive hemoculture, for 37 individuals with negative hemoculture and positive serology, and for two of six individuals with inconclusive serology and negative hemoculture. Thirteen individuals living in nonendemic areas who had negative serology were used as a negative control group: 100% had negative PCR results. Our results show that the optimized PCR protocol used here was very sensitive in detecting the presence of Trypanosoma cruzi in chronic chagasic patients. The PCR and CoML results were well correlated in all of the groups studied, which suggests that our PCR protocol may be effective in the evaluation of cure in patients who receive anti-parasite treatment.Different approaches have been used in the diagnosis of chronic Chagas' disease. Serologic tests are used to detect antibodies against Trypanosoma cruzi and not the presence of the parasite itself. These tests have high sensitivity but lack specificity because of antigenic cross-reactivity with parasites such as Leishmania sp. and T. rangeli.1,2 Parasitologic tests such as hemoculture or xenodiagnosis have proven to be highly specific, but the sensitivity of these techniques is low. Recently, molecular assays such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which amplify certain repetitive sequences of trypanosome kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) have been proposed as a good alternative tools for detection of T. cruzi in human blood.3-5 The ഠ330-basepair (bp) fragment of the kinetoplast minicircles is normally used as a target for amplification.The PCR assay has shown a variable degree of efficiency. Initial sensitivity reports ranged from 96% to 100% compared with serologic diagnosis.3,4 A lower sensitivity level was observed by Britto and others 6 and Junqueira and others. 7 These inconsistencies illustrate the need for addi...