Procalcitonin in the ICU: A Test That Promises More Than It Delivers

Critically ill patients present with inflammation and physiological abnormalities that overlap with noninfectious conditions. The Sepsis-3 criteria anchor sepsis to organ dysfunction rather than systematic inflammatory response syndrome, yet many clinicians continue to use inflammation biomarkers like procalcitonin to get faster or more-objective confirmation (see Figure 1). Despite its widespread use, we don’t know whether procalcitonin testing improves the diagnostic accuracy of sepsis in the intensive care unit (ICU). To find out, researchers pooled data from 10 observational studies involving 1100 adult patients in the ICU, of whom 635 met Sepsis-3 criteria for sepsis.