The Accuracy of Mother's Touch to Detect Fever in Children: A Systematic Review

Universally, mothers often use touching to detect fever in their children. We perform a systematic review of published diagnostic studies evaluating the ability of mothers to detect fever in their children by touching. We found 10 studies satisfying our inclusion criteria. The meta-analysis revealed a summary sensitivity of 89.2% and summary specificity of 50%—maternal touch is perhaps more useful to exclude fever rather than to ‘rule in’ fever. However, due to significant heterogeneity in the included studies, interpretation of the summary data is difficult.