Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Cold

A 22 year old college student comes in with gradual onset headache, malaise, sore throat, low-grade fever, and chills. He also has an intractable nonproductive cough. He says other people around him have had a similar illness. Physical exam is unremarkable. You present the case to the attending, sure it is a benign upper respiratory tract infection.

Challenge: Your attending who has a particular interest in infectious disease says: if this patient tested positive for cold agglutinins, what organism would you suspect?

2 comments:

Alex said...

mycoplasma

Craig said...

Nice!
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Cold

Cold agglutinins have an association with Mycoplasma pneumoniae, though the test is neither sensitive nor specific.

Source: UpToDate.