At-home self-collection of saliva, oropharyngeal swabs and dried blood spots for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis and serology: Post-collection acceptability of specimen collection process and patient confidence in specimens
Valentine-Graves et al.
The finding, in our words
Eighty-four per cent of 148 diverse US adults found self-collection of saliva, oropharyngeal swabs and dried blood spots for SARS-CoV-2 testing acceptable, and 87 per cent were confident their specimens were sufficient for laboratory analysis. The lack of demographic differences in acceptability supports broad feasibility of decentralised diagnostics.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Most internet-using men who have sex with men reported high acceptability for HIV testing options including rapid oral fluid self-testing, but home dried blood spot self-collection ranked lowest in intended usage preference. This suggests that while decentralised HIV screening is acceptable to this population, DBS self-collection methods face particular acceptability challenges that must be addressed to optimise uptake.
In a pilot mixed-methods study of youth with HIV, mailed HemaSpot-HF kits enabled home-based dried blood spot collection that participants found feasible and acceptable, supporting remote viral load monitoring and a self-management model for decentralised care.
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.
This study demonstrated that a fully remote genome sequencing study using self-collected dried blood spots and buccal swabs is feasible for individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome, with all participants completing the study and reporting the process was easy despite being lengthy. The design successfully returned actionable genetic findings, including those related to blood clot formation, to participants.
A study of older rural US patients found that 96 to 98 per cent of self-collected dried blood spot specimens were successfully analysed for HIV viral load, with high acceptability. However, concordance between self-reported and measured viral load was only 69 to 82 per cent, highlighting the value of objective decentralised microsampling over self-reporting.