Maternal colonization by Group B Streptococcus (GBS) can lead to severe infection in neonates and has also been associated with prematurity and stillbirth.
Bronner P. Gonçalves’s comments on research into maternal Group B Strep colonisation.
Bronner P. Gonçalves’s research, recently published in the iScience Journal, ‘Inferring longitudinal patterns of group B Streptococcus colonization during pregnancy’, suggests that despite a negative diagnostic result, pregnant women were likely already to have been colonized by GBS.
Here, we describe analyses of published longitudinal data using Bayesian hidden Markov models, which involve the estimation of parameters related to the succession of latent states (infection status) and observations (culture positivity). In addition to quantifying infection acquisition and clearance probabilities, the statistical approach also suggests that for some longitudinal patterns of culture results, pregnant women were likely to have been GBS-colonized despite a negative diagnostic result.
We believe this method, if used in future longitudinal studies of maternal GBS colonization, would improve our understanding of the pathologies linked to this bacterium and could also inform maternal GBS vaccine trial design.
Dr Bronner Goncalves is part of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK. Dr Goncalves is rated as a Distinguished expert in the treatment of Hemoglobin C Disease. He is also highly rated in 9 other conditions. His top areas of expertise are Hemoglobin C Disease, Malaria, Subarachnoid Hemorrhage, and Streptococcal Group B Infection.
His clinical research consists of co-authoring 60 peer reviewed articles in the past 15 years. In particular, he has co-authored 3 articles in the study of Hemoglobin C Disease.
Publication
Bronner P. Gonçalves et al., ‘Inferring longitudinal patterns of group B Streptococcus colonization during pregnancy’, iScience Journal, DOI: 107023
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