Predictive value of Serum C-Reactive protein and serum lactate in intestinal obstruction with suspected strangulation

Abstract

Background: Intestinal obstruction is one of the common clinical problems encountered in surgical practice, and the dreadful complication of intestinal obstruction is strangulation, which requires an emergency surgery for management. The main objective of our study was to evaluate patients with clinical suspicious intestinal obstruction and to find out the significant levels of serum C-reactive protein (CRP) and serum lactate in the early detections of strangulation preoperatively. Materials and Methods: A total of 30 patients who aged between 15 and 80 years were included in the study after excluding the patients of comorbid medical illness and patients with findings other than obstruction or strangulation. The serum values of CRP and lactate were measured pre-operatively and compared between obstruction with strangulation and obstruction without strangulation. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was drawn, and cut-off values for the diagnosis of strangulation were calculated along the calculation of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive values (PPVs) and negative predictive values (NPVs). Results: Fifteen patients of strangulated bowel obstruction had significantly higher values of serum CRP and lactate when compared with 15 patients of simple bowel obstruction (99 vs. 38.3 mg/L and 35 vs. 9.9 mg/dl, respectively, P < 0.05). Using ROC analysis, the area under the curve of serum CRP and lactate was found to be 0.809 and 0.947, respectively for bowel strangulation. The serum CRP test has the sensitivity of 80.0%, specificity of 66.7%, PPV of 70.6% and NPV of 76.9% to detect the obstruction with strangulation when using a cut-off value of 49 mg/L. The serum lactate test has the sensitivity of 86.7%, specificity of 73.3%, PPV of 76.5% and NPV of 84.6% to detect the obstruction with strangulation when using a cut-off value of 19 mg/dl. Conclusion: The serum CRP and lactate are useful and reasonable diagnostic markers for predicting strangulation in cases of acute intestinal obstruction in an emergency setting.