Can I get a throat prick sample for antigen testing? Reasons for using nasal swabs in antigen test sampling

In recent years, with the gradual introduction of epidemic prevention and control policies, antigen detection kits have become a popular product, creating a wave of antigen detection. Anyone who knows about antigen detection knows that this is a nasal swab, not the more comfortable pharyngeal swab, the pharyngeal swab. So why use a nasal swab for antigen testing?

Well, for one thing, neocollagenesis enters our respiratory system through our nose,Rapid antigen nasal swab so nasopharyngeal carcinoma secretions contain more viruses. But some people may have questions? Why did you have to poke your throat with a throat swab to do the nucleic acid test before? This involves the sensitivity and specificity of the nucleic acid test. The sensitivity and specificity of nucleic acid testing is now far greater than antigen testing. Even when sampling the throat where the viral load is not as high, it is possible to increase the viral load by replicating and amplifying virus-specific gene fragments to reach a threshold that can be detected by the testing instrument. The high sensitivity and specificity of nucleic acid testing facilitates large-scale nucleic acid testing that is fast and efficient.

Secondly, antigen for detection is the use of self antigen detection of antibodies in the main reagent card and swab sample solution of the virus antigen specificity to allow antigen antibody virus study shows designed. The nasopharynx has more secretions than the oropharynx. If our organism is infected by a virus, then the technical content of the virus in the nasopharynx will be significantly and significantly higher than that in the oropharynx, so it is necessary to extract the secretions from the nasopharynx for testing, which will make the results of the test data to provide a more comprehensive and accurate.

In summary, antigen detection reagents have a sensitivity between 75% and 98% and a specificity between 95% and 99%, whereas the specificity of nucleic acid testing is methodologically 100% as it is characterized by high sensitivity using real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR. This is the main reason why nucleic acid testing will poke you in the throat while antigen testing will only poke you in the nose. Of course, different antigen detection kits have different sensitivities and specificities for the same antigen, for example, fluorescent immunochromatographic antigen detection kits are about 10 times more sensitive than colloidal gold and latex antigen detection kits. However, fluorescent immunochromatographic antigen test kits require the use of a UV fluorescent color lamp (a special band of ultraviolet light) to help read the results.