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An estimated 600 million cases of group A streptococcal (GAS) pharyngitis occur each year worldwide. Diagnosis of this illness based on clinical findings is notoriously inaccurate, resulting in both missed cases and overtreatment of patients without true bacterial infection. To increase the accuracy of GAS diagnosis in adults, the CDC advocates use of the Centor score, a 5-point index that assigns points for presence of fever, cervical adenopathy, and pharyngeal exudates, and for absence of cough. Might adding real-time contemporaneous data on local incidence of GAS pharyngitis enhance the diagnostic accuracy of this score?
To find out, researchers retrospectively analyzed data for patients aged ≥15 years who had undergone testing for GAS ph…