PERANAN PROKALSITONIN PADA PNEUMONIA KOMUNITAS

In light of the limitations of clinical signs and symptoms and traditional microbiologic diagnostic for respiratory infections, blood biomarkers that correlate with the presence and extent of bacterial infections may provide additional useful information to improve diagnostic and prognostic efforts and help with therapeutic decisions in individual patients. A growing body of evidence support the use of procalcitonin (PCT) to differentiate bacterial from viral respiratory diagnoses, to help risk stratify patients, and to guide antibiotic therapy decisions about initial need for, and optimal duration of, therapy.Communityacquired peneumonia (CAP) is a significant clinical and public health problem. Recently, attention has been paid to the potential for procalcitonin (PCT) both to differentiate the diagnosis and to indicate the prognosis of pneumonia. Procalsitonin has the ability to supplement clinical information to determine whether or not the cause of the inection is likely to be bacterial. In addition, PCT seems to be superior to the most prevalent inflammatory biomarker C-reactive protein a