Intensive care medicine
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Intensive care medicine · Mar 2000
Discriminative power of inflammatory markers for prediction of tumor necrosis factor-alpha and interleukin-6 in ICU patients with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) or sepsis at arbitrary time points.
To determine the correlations and predictive strength of surrogate markers (body temperature, leukocyte count, C-reactive protein (CRP) and procalcitonin (PCT)) with elevated levels of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) in septic patients on randomly chosen days. ⋯ PCT may be an early and better marker of elevated cytokines than the more classic criteria of inflammation.
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Intensive care medicine · Mar 2000
Procalcitonin-a sensitive inflammation marker of febrile episodes in neutropenic children with cancer.
Sensitive parameters of inflammations, are rare or of limited validity in neutropenic patients. Procalcitonin (PCT) proven to be a sensitive inflammatory marker in nonneutropenic patients was evaluated for its diagnostic relevance in febrile episodes of neutropenic patients with cancer ⋯ PCT is a sensitive and specific parameter in the diagnostic and in the sequential assessment of febrile neutropenic episodes, especially in gramnegative infections. Its diagnostic accuracy in neutropenic patients is clearly higher than that of CrP.