PCT, candidate of routine infection examination

With more widely application of antibiotics in clinical practice and discovery of new viruses such as SARS and H7N9, new problems have cropped up. Due to untypical clinical symptoms and limited experience of doctors, diagnosing diseases with similar symptoms becomes difficult. Especially for bacterial infections and non-bacterial infections, their treatments are totally different. Once misdiagnosis occurs, the best treatment time might be missed. That would lead to serious consequences such as disease deterioration. Therefore, how should we judge whether it is bacterial infection or non-bacterial infection?

Researchers found that, PCT (procalcitonin) is a kind of special protein, its structure is shown in Figure 1. When serious bacterial, fungal, parasitic infections and sepsis and multiple organ failure, the concentration of the protein rises in plasma level. And when autoimmune, allergic and viral infections occur, its level will not rise. Therefore, the detection of PCT has become an important indicator to judge bacterial and non-bacterial infections.

Moreover, PCT can detect diseases such as systemic bacterial infection associated with inflammation, including peritonitis, soft tissue infections, viral infections, such as: HBV, HIV, CMV; sepsis, MODS and chronic inflammation; systemic fungal infections allergic reaction (type I ~ IV); parasitic infections, ulcers, superficial microbial transplantation development; ARDS induced by bacterials; toxic pancreatitis; bacterial meningitis; ARDS (adult respiratory distress syndrome), etc.

Take sepsis as an example,as shown in Table 1,  the quantitative detection of PCT can not only determine whether there is sepsis or not, but also can determine its treatment and prognosis. In the future, along with in-depth study of the PCT, its clinical application will be increasing widely used in the diagnosis and treatment of infections and related diseases.

Table 1. Relationship between PCT detection level and sepsis

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