The impact of procalcitonin in assessing outcomes in pediatrics severe trauma cases: A three-year experience from a tertiary hospital.

Abstract

Although procalcitonin levels are raised in patients with systemic inflammation, its usage in pediatric patients, particularly those in the intensive care unit who are most susceptible to sepsis. It is a retrospective research study that included pediatric patients aged more than two weeks who were brought to the King Fahd Hospital of the University's PICU owing to serious trauma or post-acute postoperative occurrences from January 2017 to December 2019. At 24 h after admission, data such as age, gender, comorbidities, trauma severity as measured by the Injury Severity Score, and PRISM III score were collected. Following a surgery abscess, there were a total of 39 (15.9%) deaths. Patients who died during their hospital stay had significantly higher mean levels of biomarkers such as PRISM III, PCT at 24 h, PCT 48-72 h, and PCT at day 5 (p = 0.001). The area under the ROC curve for PCT level 48/72 h was 0.89 (% CI: 0.85-0.93), p = 0.001, indicating that PCT had highly significant predictive validity in predicting in-hospital mortality at the best cutoff point of >1.35 with a high level of accuracy and precision of 82.1% and 82.0%, respectively. The serum procalcitonin level (PTCL) can help predict the in-hospital prognosis of pediatrics that has had surgery. A combined control system is designed based on PTC expression for the examination of a patient receiving medication over a longer length of time.