Chest
Clinical Investigations: InfectionC-Reactive Protein: A Clinical Marker in Community-Acquired Pneumonia
Section snippets
Patients
Twenty-eight consecutive patients admitted to our hospital with community-acquired pneumonia were prospectively studied. Pneumonia was defined as the presence of new shadowing on a chest radiograph in association with an appropriate clinical history and physical signs for which no other cause was found. Informed consent was obtained and the study was approved by the Tayside Ethical Committee. The average age was 60.5 years (range, 25 to 88 years), 18 were male, and 10 had preexisting lung
Results
Plasma CRP levels were elevated above 50 mg/L in all and above 100 mg/L in 75% of patients on the day of hospital admission. However, only 67% of patients had a pyrexia (axilliary temperature >37°C) and only 62% an elevated WBC count (>10×109/L) at time of presentation. With antibiotic treatment, CRP levels fell rapidly as demonstrated by the data for the first 5 days (Table 1). Missing CRP data for days 2 to 5 were due to patient discharge from hospital or loss of samples. One patient
Discussion
In our study, all patients admitted to hospital with community-acquired pneumonia had an elevated CRP level at the time of hospital admission. Although small, our study did suggest that plasma CRP level is a sensitive marker of pneumonia unlike other more commonly used clinical markers of sepsis such as body temperature and WBC count which were not elevated in a significant proportion of our pneumonia patients. This is supported by similar findings in other studies of community-acquired
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