02/22/2024    

PUBLISHED PODIATRISTS

FL Podiatrist Published in Journal of Fungi

 

William Scherer, DPM and Wayne Bakotic, DO are contributing authors with Aditya Gupta, MD for the February 2024 issue of the Journal of Fungi investigating laboratory testing for clinical suspicion of onychomycosis with one of the largest data sets of abnormal toenails ever published. The article, Clinical Diagnosis and Laboratory Testing of Abnormal Appearing Toenails: A Retrospective Assessment of Confirmatory Testing for Onychomycosis in the United States, 2022–2023 concludes that for clinically diagnosed onychomycosis patients, the overall positivity rate was only 59.4%. 

 

Dr. William Scherer

 

In this retrospective cohort study, they assessed confirmatory laboratory testing results with matching clinical diagnoses with 96,293 nail specimens submitted during a 9-month period from 2022 to 2023. Despite the risk of mis-diagnosis, confirmatory laboratory testing is under-utilized and their results support the use of it for toenail pathology when there is a clinical diagnosis of onychomycosis.