ReviewFrontiers in surgery2024
Diagnostic value of procalcitonin in patients with periprosthetic joint infection: a diagnostic meta-analysis.
Review in Frontiers in surgery, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Synovial interleukin-6 point-of-care testing, alone and combined with D-dimer, supports rapid diagnosis of periprosthetic joint infection.Knee surgery, sports traumatology, arthroscopy : official journal of the ESSKA · 2026Article
- Key Inflammatory Pathways, Biomarkers, and Targeted Management Strategies in Primary Total Joint Arthroplasty: A Narrative Review.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2026Review
- Article
- Beyond Cultures: The Evolving Role of Molecular Diagnostics, Synovial Biomarkers and Artificial Intelligence in the Diagnosis of Prosthetic Joint Infections.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Review
- Periprosthetic joint infection after arthroplasty: advances and future prospects.Journal of orthopaedic surgery and research · 2025Review
- The Ongoing Struggle to Find a Gold Standard for PJI Diagnosis.Reports (MDPI) · 2025Review
- Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: The success rate of periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) treatment is still low. Early diagnosis is the key to successful treatment. Therefore, it is necessary to find a biomarker with high sensitivity and specificity. The diagnostic value of serum procalcitonin (PCT) for PJI was systematically evaluated to provide the theoretical basis for clinical diagnosis and treatment in this study. Methods: We searched the Web of Science, Embase, Cochrane Library, and PubMed for studies that evaluated the diagnostic value of serum PCT for PJI (from the inception of each database until September 2020). Two authors independently screened the literature according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The quality of each selected literature was evaluated by using the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies tool (QUADAS-2) tool. RevMan 5.3 software was used for the quality evaluation. The sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) were merged by using Meta-DiSc 1.4 software. The area under the curve (AUC) and Q index were calculated after the summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) was generated. We also performed subgroup analysis. Results: A total of 621 patients were enrolled in the nine studies. The pooled sensitivity of serum PCT for PJI diagnosis was 0.441 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.384-0.500], the pooled specificity was 0.852 (95% CI, 0.811-0.888), the pooled PLR was 2.271 (95% CI, 1.808-2.853), the pooled NLR was 0.713 (95% CI, 0.646-0.786), and the pooled DOR was 5.756 (95% CI, 3.673-9.026). The area under SROC (the pooled AUC) was 0.76 (0.72-0.79). Q index was 0.6948. Conclusion: This study showed that PCT detection of PJI had poor diagnostic accuracy. Hence, the serum PCT is not suitable as a serum marker for PJI diagnosis.
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