Giardia lamblia infection: review of current diagnostic strategies

Giardiasis has a global distribution and is a common cause of diarrhea in both children and adults and is transmitted via the fecal-oral route through direct or indirect ingestion of cysts.  The laboratory diagnosis of Giardia mainly based on demonstration of microscopic cyst or  trophozoite in stool samples but several immunological-based assays and molecular methods also are available for giardiasis diagnosis. The aim of this study was to conduct a review of the methods applied in medical laboratory and highlights pitfalls and challenges of them for diagnosis of giardiasis. In this article we evaluated the giardia diagnostic methods with a broad review of literature, electronic databases and books. The search covered the articles and some textbook published up to 2018.   It concludes that traditional microscopy combination with stool concentration method should still be held in the routine medical laboratory due to economical and high sensitivity and immunological-based assay and molecular methods are recommended used as a complementary test to the traditional technique.