Cerebral malaria is the most severe form of malaria, and children are more susceptible to this life threatening disease. But if correctly diagnosed and given proper treatment, the patients are said to recover rapidly.
While uncomplicated malaria can be treated with oral medications, it requires more comprehensive care to treat severe forms of the disease.
In what would be a game changer in providing timely intervention, Karl Seydel and colleagues at Michigan State University have developed a new screening tool that can determine which children are at the greatest risk of progressing to cerebral malaria.
The researchers tested patients' blood for HRP2 - a protein produced by the malaria parasite, and found it to be an accurate predictor of how the disease progressed among children at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.
If the HRP2 levels are low, clinicians can be more than 98 percent sure that the child will not progress to cerebral malaria, and that would give them the confidence to merely prescribe oral drugs and send the child home, the researchers said.
In its current form, the HRP2 test is expensive and poorly suited to use in rural clinics, and therefore a less expensive and more portable version is being developed, said Seydel.
The study is published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
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