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

Summary BACKGROUND: 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. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSION: 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.