Severity-of-illness assessment in community-acquired pneumonia

Severity assessment in community-acquired pneumonia.

In current guidelines for the management of adults with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), the triaging decision about hospitalization or intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and, as a consequence, selection of initial antimicrobial treatment is largely based on the assessment of pneumonia severity. The proposed severity criteria are mainly derived from studies determining predictors of advers...

Importance of severity assessment: community-acquired pneumonia.

Pneumonia Severity Index and CURB 65 are the two most important prognostic scoring tools to predict mortality for patients with CAP. These tools accurately predict mortality but do not directly measure disease severity. The clinical assessment is still required to decide hospital admission or ICU care. Prognostic scoring systems have been used to assist in the site-of-care decisions, with limit...

Assessment of illness severity in community acquired pneumonia: a useful new prediction tool?

Severity assessment in community-acquired pneumonia: a review.

Severity assessment is an important early step in the management of patients presenting with community-acquired pneumonia. Various pneumonia-specific scores, generic sepsis scores and predictive biomarkers have been proposed as tools to aid clinicians in key management decisions. However, there is no uniform agreement about the optimum severity assessment tool to use. This review provides a sum...

ICU admission and severity assessment in community-acquired pneumonia

The past 15 years have seen major advances in our understanding of severity assessment in community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Prognostic tools have been promoted to guide all major management decisions in CAP, including admission to the critical care unit. Several recent studies, including the study by Renaud and colleagues, have challenged us to re-evaluate how we consider severe CAP, a concep...