Monitoring the parasite load in chronic Chagas disease patients: comparison between blood culture and quantitative real time PCR.

Background: Despite the improvements in diagnostic tools for detection of Trypanosoma cruzi in human blood samples, the isolation of parasite from bloodstream in the chronic phase of Chagas disease is challenging. Thus, there is an increasing interest in the development of strategies that allow an accurate monitoring of the parasite load in bloodstream of Chagas disease patients. Given that, the comparison of a classical diagnostic method such as blood culture and multiplex quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) was few explored so far.