Nucleic acid testing (NAT) is increasingly used for the diagnosis and management of infectious diseases, genetic diseases and cancer. When compared to traditional clinical laboratory tests, nucleic acid testing not only replaces many of them, it is also capable of finding out the cause of the disease quickly that cannot be done before. In particular, it is rapidly becoming the standard for the diagnosis of some infectious diseases due to its high level of sensitivity and specificity. Furthermore, the ease to quantify accurately using qPCR enables this method to be used routinely for monitoring the treatment of chronic infections.
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