Affiliation:
1. Microbiology Section, Department of Experimental Medicine, University of Perugia, 06100 Perugia, Italy
Abstract
Procalcitonin (PCT) can discriminate bacterial from viral systemic infections and true bacteremia from contaminated blood cultures. The aim of this study was to evaluate PCT diagnostic accuracy in discriminating Gram-positive, Gram-negative, and fungal bloodstream infections. A total of 1,949 samples from patients with suspected bloodstream infections were included in the study. Median PCT value in Gram-negative (13.8 ng/mL, interquartile range (IQR) 3.4–44.1) bacteremias was significantly higher than in Gram-positive (2.1 ng/mL, IQR 0.6–7.6) or fungal (0.5 ng/mL, IQR 0.4–1) infections (P<0.0001). Receiver operating characteristic analysis showed an area under the curve (AUC) for PCT of 0.765 (95% CI 0.725–0.805,P<0.0001) in discriminating Gram-negatives from Gram-positives at the best cut-off value of 10.8 ng/mL and an AUC of 0.944 (95% CI 0.919–0.969,P<0.0001) in discriminating Gram-negatives from fungi at the best cut-off of 1.6 ng/mL. Additional results showed a significant difference in median PCT values between Enterobacteriaceae and nonfermentative Gram-negative bacteria (17.1 ng/mL, IQR 5.9–48.5 versus 3.5 ng/mL, IQR 0.8–21.5;P<0.0001). This study suggests that PCT may be of value to distinguish Gram-negative from Gram-positive and fungal bloodstream infections. Nevertheless, its utility to predict different microorganisms needs to be assessed in further studies.
Subject
Biochemistry, medical,Clinical Biochemistry,Genetics,Molecular Biology,General Medicine
Cited by
91 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献