A CBC-derived score associated with dengue NS1 antigen positivity among suspected dengue patients in Dhaka: a retrospective model-development study

A three-parameter CBC-derived score predicts same-day dengue NS1 antigen positivity in 596 suspected patients in Dhaka, with optimism-corrected AUC 0.9429.

• Why it matters: Early triage for suspected dengue is needed when confirmatory NS1 testing is delayed or inconsistent, but simple same-day tools are limited in high-volume settings.
• What they did: Using retrospective data from 19 August to 12 October 2023 at Uttara Adhunik Medical College Hospital, the team built a LASSO-penalized logistic model from same-day CBC and NS1 results, then derived an integer score from platelet count, white blood cell count, and monocyte count.
• The result: Among 306/596 (51.3%) NS1-positive patients, the Youden-derived cutoff 11.825 gave sensitivity 0.833 and specificity 0.966, and the model modestly improved over platelet count alone (AUC 0.944 vs 0.931; DeLong p=0.00364).

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.