© 2003 BMJ Publishing Group & British Thoracic Society
EDITORIAL
Community acquired pneumonia
Assessment of illness severity in community acquired pneumonia: a useful new prediction tool?
Consultant in General and Respiratory Medicine, Manchester Royal Infirmary, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9WL; mark.woodhead@cmmc.nhs.uk
The clinical heterogeneity of CAP means that no severity scoring system will ever be able consistently to separate all patients into correct management subgroups, but the recently developed CURB-65 prediction tool appears to be an advance.
Keywords: community acquired pneumonia; severity assessment
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Illness severity might usefully guide a number of management decisions in the care pathway of a patient with community acquired pneumonia (CAP). Whether to refer to hospital by the primary care physician, whether to admit by the hospital junior doctor, what investigations to perform, what antibiotic(s) to give, and whether to admit to the intensive care unit (ICU) are just some examples. This approach is captured to a varying extent in a number of the published management guidelines for CAP.1–5 While a clinical prediction tool to assess severity might therefore be helpful, there is no agreement on what constitutes the best approach to this. Additional caveats are that such a tool would need to be better than current practice, would need to accurately do what it sets out to do (that is, predict outcome), would need to be simple to use in a variety of settings, would
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Thorax 2003 58: 371.[Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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