Media Contact:
Helen Chernikoff
hchernikoff@hadassah.org
NEW YORK, NY — In the largest study of its kind ever undertaken, the Hadassah Medical Organization, a leading Israeli hospital system, has shown that testing pools of newborns’ saliva is a highly effective way to screen for congenital cytomegalovirus, also known as cCMV. It is so effective, in fact, that it can identify the virus even among infants who are asymptomatic. Hadassah’s study further showed the method to be as accurate as individual screening and far superior to, and more efficient than, the current global standard of care. The study’s outcomes were published on March 8, 2024, in the journal Nature Medicine.
If the pooled-saliva screening method were to become the new global standard of care, the number of children who develop severe cognitive and auditory problems related to cytomegalovirus could decrease dramatically.
Congenital cytomegalovirus is extremely common in both adults and infants, but while usually harmless in adults, when contracted by babies in the womb, it can lead to developmental disabilities and hearing loss. Roughly one in every 200 babies is born with the virus, and 20% of those who have it will develop long-term problems, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Unfortunately, 50% of those born with cytomegalovirus are asymptomatic at birth and do not receive the antiviral treatment which, when administered during the first month of life, can mitigate the severity of the problems caused by the virus.
However, under the current global standard of care, hospitals test only infants who are at high risk of developing congenital cytomegalovirus, identified by a hearing loss or evidence of a cCMV infection in the mother. Because the pooled-saliva regimen tests every single newborn, it is able to detect the virus in even asymptomatic infants.
Having learned the effectiveness of pooled testing during the coronavirus, the study’s lead investigators, Dana G. Wolf, MD, a senior infectious diseases physician at the Hadassah Medical Organization, and Moran Yassour, PhD, a professor of computer science and computational biology at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, decided to see if it would be equally effective with cytomegalovirus. Testing infants’ saliva in pools of eight, they were able to identify many more babies with cytomegalovirus than they would have if they had tested only infants at high risk of developing the virus.
Equally noteworthy, during the three-month period in which investigators compared the pooled-saliva method to individual testing, the gold standard, they identified as many cases of congenital cytomegalovirus as they would have had they tested every single infant.
With these results in hand, Hadassah proceeded to implement the pooled-saliva method across its entire hospital system. Over the next 13 months, 15,805 newborns were screened – more than twice as many as had been screened in the next-largest study (roughly 7,000) – and 54 were found to have cytomegalovirus. Of those, 55%, or 30 infants, were asymptomatic, meaning that the virus would not have been caught using the current global standard of care.
ABOUT THE HADASSAH MEDICAL ORGANIZATION:
For more than a century, the Hadassah Medical Organization, the Jerusalem-based hospital system founded and owned by Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, has set the standard for excellence in medical treatment and research in Israel. The experience and ingenuity of Hadassah’s doctors and scientists have yielded ideas with vast potential in all areas of medicine, including therapeutics, diagnostic medical devices and digital health.