Does Procalcitonin Help Stratify Risk in Patients with Community-Acquired Pneumonia?

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) can be a mild outpatient disease or a serious, even fatal one. Several clinical scoring systems are available to guide disposition decisions for patients with CAP, yet none are perfect.

In a prospective multicenter study of 1770 adults hospitalized with CAP, researchers assessed the association between serum procalcitonin levels at hospital presentation and need for invasive respiratory support or vasopressors within 72 hours (6.5% of patients). Using logistic regression models, the researchers also assessed whether the addition of procalcitonin changed the performance of three established clinical prediction scores.

On its own, procalcitonin's ability to distinguish between patients who did and did not need…