RESUMO
Objective To study the occurrence of acute gastrointestinal injury under different critical status in Pediatric Intensive Care Unit,and to assess the connection between citrulline and acute gastrointestinal injury.To ana-lyze the correlation among serum citrulline and C-reaction protein(CRP),procalcitonin(PCT),creatinine,urea nitro-gen,bilirubin,lactate,albumin.To study the role of citrulline in evaluating the children condition,prognosis and changes in critically ill children.Methods Ninety-six pediatric patients who were critically ill at the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of the Second Hospital of Lanzhou University were selected,excluding those with primary gastrointestinal diseases and chronic kidney disease.Clinical features were recorded and CRP,PCT,creatinine,urea nitrogen,bilirubin,lactate, and albumin were measured.Serum citrulline concentrations were measured by high performance liquid chromatography in 65 patients with gastrointestinal injury,and sensitivity,specificity and area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC)curve were calculated.Results The incidence of acute gastrointestinal injuries in non-critical group,critical group,reorganization critical group were 47.06%(16/34 cases),75.00%(36/48 cases),92.86%(13/14 cases) (χ2=11.848,P=0.003).The serum citrulline concentrations of gastrointestinal injury group and non- gastrointesti-nal injury group were(14.655 ± 8.231)μmol/L,(23.522 ± 11.079)μmol/L(t=4.398,P<0.05).The area under ROC of citrulline was 0.079 8.Serum citrulline concentrations increased significantly in infants with very severe gastro-intestinal injury after 3 days of treatment compared with admission[(26. 40 ± 16. 10)μmol/L vs.(14. 40 ± 6.82)μmol/L,t=5.524,P=0.029].The lower serum citrulline levels the children had,the higher mortality was. There were negative correlations among serum citrullin and CRP,PCT and length of hospital stay(r = -0. 319,-0.299,-0.364,P=0.003,0.006,0.001).There were no correlations among serum citrullin and blood urea nitro-gen,lactic acid,albumin,and bilirubin levels.Conclusion The more critically ill children have a higher incidence of acute gastrointestinal injury and the worse the prognosis.Serum citrulline levels may well reflect the extent of acute gas-trointestinal injury and the outcome.Perhaps it can be one of the reliable markers to evaluate the function of gastrointes-tinal and participate in assessing critical condition and prognosis in critical ill children ness.