A retrospective review of vital signs and clinical outcomes of febrile infants younger than 3 months old presenting to the emergency department.
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Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Febrile infants younger than 3 months old present a diagnostic dilemma to the emergency physician. We aim to describe a large population of febrile infants less than 3 months old presenting to a pediatric emergency department (ED) and to assess the performance of current heart rate guidelines in the prediction of serious infections (SI). MATERIALS AND METHODS: We performed a retrospective review of febrile infants younger than 3 months old, between March 2015 and Feb 2016, in a large tertiary pediatric ED. We documented the primary outcome of SI for each infant, as well as the clinical findings, vital signs, and Severity Index Score (SIS). We assessed the performance of the Paediatric Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (PaedCTAS), Advanced Pediatric Life Support (APLS) guidelines and Fleming normal reference values, using sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and area under receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC). RESULTS: 1057 infants were analyzed, with 326 (30.6%) infants diagnosed with SI. High temperature, tachycardia, and low SIS score were significantly associated with SI. Item analysis showed that the SIS performance was driven by the presence of mottling (p = 0.003) and high temperature (p<0.001). The APLS guideline had the highest sensitivity (66.0%, 95% CI 60.5-71.1%), NPV (73.3%, 95% CI 69.7-76.5%) and AUC (0.538), while the PaedCTAS (2 standard deviation from normal) had the highest specificity (98.5%, 95% CI 97.3-99.3%) and PPV (55.2%, 95% CI 32.7-71.0%). CONCLUSIONS: Current guidelines on infantile heart rates have a variable performance. In our study, the APLS heart rate guidelines performed with the highest sensitivity, but no individual guideline predicted for SIs satisfactorily.
Date Issued
2018-01-05
Date Acceptance
2017-12-18
Citation
PLoS ONE, 2018, 13 (1)
ISSN
1932-6203
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Journal / Book Title
PLoS ONE
Volume
13
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2018 Chong et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
License URL
Identifier
PII: PONE-D-17-16126
Subjects
MD Multidisciplinary
General Science & Technology
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
e0190649