Wound Care Panel

• Traditional lab culture techniques fail to identify many organisms in wound
• Less than 5% of bacteria will grow in a traditional lab culture
• Sample handling has a large effect on quality of results
• Costly to test for aerobic, anaerobic, and fungi
• Chronic wounds are difficult to heal and require specialized treatment
• Chronic wounds are often infected with multiple bacteria

Acute and chronic wounds cause significant clinical sequalae including pain, swelling, failure to heal, expansive tissue damage, and potentially progression to sepsis. Evaluation and determination of the causative pathogens in common wound infections can guide clinicians to appropriate and timely treatment choices for patients presenting with significant lesions. Pathogen identification is most frequently combined with the detection of antibiotic resistance gene determinants in order to best guide initial and subsequent treatment choices. Molecular detection of pathogens most commonly associated with wound infections provides an often-superior method over traditional routine microbiology culture methods since typically only a fraction of present and viable pathogens in a wound will grow in laboratory culture. Molecular (PCR) methods can detect the presence of each pathogen’s respective genetic material and this method provides a very sensitive and specific method to determine which pathogenic organisms are present in wounds.

1. Confirm the diagnosis of an infectious disease caused by common bacterial infections
2. Help in the differential diagnosis of a pathogen
3. Assist in the evaluation of the prognosis of different wound infections
4. Provides simultaneous qualitative detection and identification of multiple nucleic acids, accomplished using PCR, of most common wound-associated pathogens directly from specimens obtained from wound swabs.