Evaluation of Procalcitonin in Adult Patients with Fever

Fever is one of the most common reasons for people to attend the emergency department and Infectious Diseases Service. While the fever is a symptom caused by infectious and noninfectious diseases the biggest challenge is to discriminate as soon as possible potentially life threatening conditions that have as main component the fever, like sepsis which is caused by an extreme systemic response to infection by microbial organisms. Recognition of sepsis and rapid treatment with appropriate antimicrobial drugs is important to maximize the chances of survival. There are a few laboratory tests that are used to assess for an ongoing infectious process, such as WBC, CRP, ESR, and blood cultures. These tests are not sensitive or specific for bacterial infection and sepsis. Procalcitonin is a relatively new diagnostic test which has been found useful in early identification of severe bacterial infections, and differentiating systemic inflammatory response syndrome from sepsis. Procalcitonin is a biomarker with excellent specificity for sepsis, while other laboratory values, such as WBC, CRP, sputum and urine culture, are non-sensitive, non-specific and unreliable. This is the first study conducted in the adult Albanian patients with fever in which we evaluated the levels of PCT, CRP and WBC in patients who presented or developed fever.