OBJECTIVE To study the application value of procalcitonin (PCT) in patients with central nervous system (CNS) infection. PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 66 patients, including 24 patients with suppurative meningitis, 20 patients with viral meningitis and 22 patients with tuberculous meningitis, were enrolled. 20 patients admitted to the hospital due to epilepsy or headache without infection i...

Procalcitonin (PCT) serum concentration increases abnormally in bacteremia, severe sepsis and septic shock and was described as an inflamation-induced protein. The aim of this study is to evaluate the clinical application of PCT-Q test for determination procalcitonin (PCT) serum level in patients with suspected sepsis. Fifty six patients according the criteria for sepsis (ACCP/SCCM,1992) and 19...

The concentration of immunoreactive uroporphyrinogen decarboxylase has been measured in erythrocytes from 17 patients with porphyria cutanea tarda (PCT) from 10 families, from 74 of their relatives, and from 47 control subjects. The 10 families were divided into two groups according to their erythrocyte enzyme concentrations. Group A contained four families in which at least two subjects had ov...

BACKGROUND The reported sensitivities and specificities of procalcitonin (PCT) concentrations for the diagnosis of neonatal infection vary widely. A postnatal increase of PCT has been observed in healthy term newborns with a peak at approximately 24 h of age, and many questions remain regarding maternal and perinatal factors that may influence the normal PCT kinetics during the immediate postna...

background procalcitonin (pct) levels are increased in sepsis. in most previously conducted research, pct levels were found to increase during septic shock. objectives the purpose of this study was to compare pct levels with crp and esr levels in children with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (sirs), sepsis, and septic shock. methods this cross-sectional study was conducted between decem...

BACKGROUND Procalcitonin (PCT) has become a commonly used serum inflammatory marker. Our aim was to describe the kinetics and usefulness of serial post-operative PCT measurements to detect bacterial infection in a cohort of children immediately after pediatric liver transplantation (pLT). METHODS We performed a retrospective chart review of a cohort of pLT recipients with serial serum PCT mea...

We report a transfusion trial of platelets photochemically treated for pathogen inactivation using the synthetic psoralen amotosalen HCl. Patients with thrombocytopenia were randomly assigned to receive either photochemically treated (PCT) or conventional (control) platelets for up to 28 days. The primary end point was the proportion of patients with World Health Organization (WHO) grade 2 blee...

BACKGROUND This study aimed to determine whether medical history and semen analysis can predict the result of the post-coital test (PCT). METHODS A previously reported data set of Dutch patients collected between 1985 and 1993 was used. Our study was limited to just patients with an ovulatory cycle. Data were complete for medical history, semen analysis and PCT. We performed logistic regressi...

OBJECTIVE To study the levels of procalcitonin (PCT) in various inflammatory states seen in an internal medicine department and to evaluate the possible discriminative role of PCT in differentiating bacterial infection from other inflammatory processes. METHODS PCT, C reactive protein (CRP), and white blood cell count (WBC) were measured in patients admitted to the department for fever or bio...