Valuable hematological indicators for the diagnosis and severity assessment of Chinese children with community-acquired pneumonia: Prealbumin

Ning, Jingjing; Shao, Xiaonan; Ma, Yibo; Lv, Darong

The common pathogens causing CAP include bacteria, viruses, mycoplasma, chlamydia, and so on. In recent years, MP has become most common cause of CAP in children. [8, 9] Previous studies have shown that up to 40% of CAP has MP infection, and 18% of them required hospitalization. [10] Recently, Shu et al [11] analyzed 1155 cases of children with CAP in Shanghai, and the detection rate of MP infection was 43.64%, whereas bacterial The incidence of MP infection is related to the age and immune status of the patient, and the recurrent infections are rare. Infants and young children under age 3 years often manifest as mild or subclinical infection. The peak age with MP infection is preschool and school-age children, 7% to 30% of patients with CAP between ages 3 and 15 years are caused by MP infection. [12] Shu et al [11] found that children between ages 6 and 14 years have a high detection rate of MP infection (77.4%), and the lowest detection rate was from children under age 1 year (11.2%). In our study, the detection rate of MP was 27.4%, which was lower than 43.64% that reported by Shu, the reason might be attributed to the low average age of children in this study. MP infections can occur throughout the year, and the peak season was different in different regions. The epidemic seasons in north of China is winter but is summer and autumn in the south of China. [12] There was no seasonal difference for positive rate of MP infections in this study, which might be related to the small sample size. In addition, we found there was no significant correlation between the severity of CAP in children and the presence of MP infection; it was possible that bacterial pathogens were the major cause of severe CAP. [13]