ArticleJournal of clinical laboratory analysis2010
Is procalcitonin better than C-reactive protein for early diagnosis of bacterial pneumonia in children?
Article in Journal of clinical laboratory analysis, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The management of community-acquired pneumonia in infants and children older than 3 months of age: clinical practice guidelines by the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2011Guideline
- ERS/ESCMID state-of-the-science statement on the role of rapid diagnostic tests for the diagnosis and management of community-acquired lower respiratory tract infections.The European respiratory journal · 2026Review
- Serum procalcitonin as a predictor of severity of pneumonia in under-five children: A prospective observational study.World journal of methodology · 2026Article
- Advanced biomarkers for prognostic evaluation of pneumonia severity in pediatric intensive care: focus on novel inflammatory and hematological ratios.Italian journal of pediatrics · 2025Article
- Plasma exosomes contain protein biomarkers valuable for the diagnosis of lung cancer.Discover oncology · 2024Article
- Procalcitonin and Presepsin as Markers of Infectious Respiratory Diseases in Children: A Scoping Review of the Literature.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Early Lactate Clearance as a Determinant of Survival in Patients with Sepsis: Findings from a Low-resource Country.Journal of critical care medicine (Universitatea de Medicina si Farmacie din Targu-Mures) · 2023Article
- Evaluating the Usefulness of Lab-Based Test for the Diagnosis of Pneumonia in Children.International journal of general medicine · 2020Article
- Prospective evaluation of serum procalcitonin in critically ill patients with suspected sepsis- experience from a tertiary care hospital in Pakistan.Annals of medicine and surgery (2012) · 2018Article
- Procalcitonin for Diagnostics and Treatment Decisions in Pediatric Lower Respiratory Tract Infections.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2017Article
- Multicenter case-control study protocol of pneumonia etiology in children: Global Approach to Biological Research, Infectious diseases and Epidemics in Low-income countries (GABRIEL network).BMC infectious diseases · 2014Article
- Procalcitonin predicts response to beta-lactam treatment in hospitalized children with community-acquired pneumonia.PloS one · 2012Article
- The Saudi Thoracic Society evidence-based guidelines for the diagnosis and management of community-acquired pneumonia in children and adults.Annals of thoracic medicineArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Early diagnosis of bacterial pneumonia plays a pivotal role in the management. We evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of procalcitonin (PCT) as compared with C-reactive protein (CRP) for the early diagnosis of bacterial pneumonia in children. In total, 92 children consisting of 46 patients of bacterial pneumonia were admitted in the Military hospital, Rawalpindi, Pakistan and equal number of controls were included. Patient's investigations were carried out at admission. PCT and CRP were analyzed on Vidas analyzer and Immulite 1000, respectively. Out of 46 pneumonia patients, 28 were male and 18 female, with a median age of 4 years. PCT levels were significantly high median (range) of 2.69 ng/ml (0.30-13.00) vs. 0.45 ng/ml (0.10-2.00) in controls. Serum CRP levels were moderately elevated with median (range) 6.5 mg/l (0.30-60) vs. 0.30 mg/l (0.30-5.0) in controls. The area under receiver characteristic curves for PCT and CRP were 0.89 (95% CI=0.83-0.96) and 0.79 (95% CI=0.70-0.88), respectively. In total, 38 patients were diagnosed to have bacterial pneumonia with PCT (sensitivity 83% at cutoff > or = 1 ng/ml) and 26 children with CRP (sensitivity 57% at cutoff > or = 6 mg/L). PCT has better diagnostic accuracy than CRP and can be utilized for early diagnosis of bacterial pneumonia in children.
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