Early Identification of Sepsis in Children

The understanding of sepsis pathophysiology underwent a great progress during the last decades and the therapy of sepsis is in the focus of the research for many years, but sepsis is still one of the main causes of death in the ICUs around the world. Systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) is closely connected with the sepsis development, but SIRS also represents a high risk of organ dysfunction in non-infectious patients (trauma, stress, cardiopulmonary arrest). Early diagnosis and prevention of the organ dysfunction are the mainstay of the correct and timely therapy, but currently there is no reliable, quick and simple method for the diagnosis of sepsis. And also there is no generally accepted clinical or laboratory parameter, which can be used to differentiate between sepsis and SIRS.

There are some commonly available biomarkers that showed promising results in critically ill adult patients. Those include immature platelet fraction (IPF), immature granulocytes (IG) count and nucleated red blood cells (NRBC) count. The knowledge of their variability in different phases of illness (SIRS/sepsis/severe sepsis/septic shock) in pediatric patients is very limited, as is their connection with other generally used markers of infection (CRP, procalcitonin, presepsin).

This study is strictly non-interventional and focused on usability of above mentioned biomarkers in the early diagnosis of sepsis/SIRS and on the reduction of morbidity/mortality of pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) patients with sepsis/SIRS.

In all patients admitted to PICU in selected study period, the inflammation markers - C-reactive protein (CRP), procalcitonin (PCT), presepsin (soluble cluster of differentiation 14-subtypes) and full blood count parameters -IPF,IG,NRBC will be measured at the time of admission and on 3rd, 5th and 7th day of stay in intensive care. The organ dysfunction score will be evaluated daily.