Trial reportPloS one2019
Development of a prognostic risk score to aid antibiotic decision-making for children aged 2-59 months with World Health Organization fast breathing pneumonia in Malawi: An Innovative Treatments in Pneumonia (ITIP) secondary analysis.
Trial report in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 5 citations in OpenAlex.
- Antibiotic therapy versus no antibiotic therapy for children aged 2 to 59 months with WHO-defined non-severe pneumonia and wheeze.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2021Pooled it
- Narrative review of clinical prediction models for paediatric community acquired pneumonia.Paediatric respiratory reviews · 2025Review
- Assembling a global database of child pneumonia studies to inform WHO pneumonia management algorithm: Methodology and applications.Journal of global health · 2022Article
- External validation of the RISC, RISC-Malawi, and PERCH clinical prediction rules to identify risk of death in children hospitalized with pneumonia.Journal of global health · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundDue to increasing antimicrobial resistance in low-resource settings, strategies to rationalize antibiotic treatment of children unlikely to have a bacterial infection are needed. This study's objective was to utilize a database of placebo treated Malawian children with World Health Organization (WHO) fast breathing pneumonia to develop a prognostic risk score that could aid antibiotic decision making.
methodsWe conducted a secondary analysis of children randomized to the placebo group of the Innovative Treatments in Pneumonia (ITIP) fast breathing randomized, controlled, noninferiority trial. Participants were low-risk HIV-uninfected children 2-59 months old with WHO fast breathing pneumonia in Lilongwe, Malawi. Study endpoints were treatment failure, defined as either disease progression at any time on or before Day 4 of treatment or disease persistence on Day 4, or relapse, considered as the recurrence of pneumonia or severe disease among previously cured children between Days 5 and 14. We utilized multivariable linear regression and stepwise model selection to develop a model to predict the probability of treatment failure or relapse.
resultsTreatment failure or relapse occurred in 11.5% (61/526) of children included in this analysis. The final model incorporated the following predictors: heart rate terms, mid-upper arm circumference, malaria status, water source, family income, and whether or not a sibling or other child in the household received childcare outside the home. The model's area under the receiver operating characteristic score was 0.712 (95% confidence interval 0.66, 0.78) and it explained 6.1% of the variability in predicting treatment failure or relapse (R2, 0.061). For the model to categorize all children with treatment failure or relapse correctly, 77% of children without treatment failure or relapse would require antibiotics.
conclusionThe model had inadequate discrimination to be appropriate for clinical application. Different strategies will likely be required for models to perform accurately among similar pediatric populations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.