Research progress of the serum procalcitonin in patients with intra-abdominal infection / 医学研究生学报

ABSTRACT

Serum procalcitonin (PCT), an important diagnostic biomarker for bacterial infection, has been used to guide the diagnosis and treatment in some infectious diseases. PCT has been proven to be helpful for the early diagnosis and guiding the antibiotic treatment of intra-abdominal infection (IAI), and it is related to the severity of IAI. However, it is still controversial whether PCT has the advantage of early diagnosis compared with C-reactive protein (CRP), whether it can be further used in severity grading of IAI. And either the critical value of PCT to the early diagnosis of IAI or the cutoff ranges of PCT to stop using antibiotics in patients with IAI is still uncertain. In this review, we discuss the value of PCT in the early diagnosis, severity evaluation and antibiotic treatment of IAI and other infectious diseases.