Clinical InvestigationDiagnostic and Prognostic Significance of Serum C-Reactive Protein Levels in Patients Admitted to the Department of Medicine
Section snippets
Setting
This analysis was conducted in Tel Aviv Souraski Medical Center, which is the major community and tertiary care University Hospital in Tel Aviv (1150 beds).
Patients
Five hundred fourteen adult (age ≥18 years) patients were admitted to the Department of Internal Medicine B during the 2-month period of the analysis. One hundred forty-four patients were excluded, including patients who were transferred from another department, who had been mechanically ventilated before admission, after significant trauma
Epidemiologic and Clinical Data
Three hundred seventy patients were included in the study. General epidemiologic and clinical data are presented in Table 1 and the main laboratory data are presented in Table 2. The leading cause of admission was infectious disease (Table 3), present in 144 admitted patients (39%). Other frequent diagnoses were nonischemic CVS disease and chest pain for observation. As shown in Table 4, the most common infections were viral infection and pneumonia. Sepsis was present in 39 of 144 (27%) of the
DISCUSSION
Despite numerous studies on serum CRP as a marker of inflammation and prognosis in specific situations and various disease states,4., 5., 6., 7., 8., 9., 10., 11., 12., 13. the current study was unique, and, to the best of our knowledge, the first in providing direct comparison of serum CRP among a cohort of all consecutive medical in-hospital patients.
The data show that despite the high variability and overlap of serum CRP in the various diagnoses, the initial CRP has an ability to
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank Doron Comaneshter, PhD, for his excellent statistical work.
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RK and BB equally contributed to the study and manuscript.