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Serum procalcitonin levels can be used to differentiate between inflammatory and non-inflammatory diarrhea in acute infectious diarrhea.
Medicine (Baltimore). 2018 Aug;97(32):e11795
Authors: Shin HJ, Kang SH, Moon HS, Sung JK, Jeong HY, Kim JS, Joo JS, Lee ES, Kim SH, Lee BS
Abstract
In this study, we assess the possibility of using procalcitonin levels to differentiate between inflammatory diarrhea and non-inflammatory diarrhea in acute infectious diarrhea.We reviewed the records of 1176 patients who had symptoms of diarrhea, fever (≥37.8 °C), and abdominal pain between March 2011 and May 2015. After applying exclusion criteria, a sample of 514 patients was considered for study. The patient sample was divided into Group A and Group B for inflammatory diarrhea and non-inflammatory diarrhea, respectively. The assessment involved comparing the laboratory characteristics with the clinical characteristics of the groups.The characteristics of Group A, such as white blood cell (WBC), C-reactive protein (CRP), absolute neutrophil count (ANC), and procalcitonin levels, were relatively higher than those of Group B (P < .001 for Group A). A receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed that the highest area-under-the-curve (AUC) value of procalcitonin (0.797; 95% confidence interval [CI] [0.760, 0.831]; P < .001), could be used to differentiate between the 2 groups. Procalcitonin exhibited a sensitivity and a specificity of 87.03% and 68.75%, respectively, at a 0.08 ng/mL cut-off level.Procalcitonin was a good candidate biomarker of inflammatory diarrhea than other inflammatory markers.
PMID: 30095641 [PubMed - in process]