Predictive Value of Clinician "Gestalt" in Pediatric Community-Acquired Pneumonia

Community-Acquired Pneumonia Diagnosis Following Emergency Department Visits for Respiratory Illness

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is often considered for children presenting to the emergency department (ED) with respiratory symptoms. It is unclear how often children are diagnosed with CAP following an ED visit for respiratory illness. We performed a retrospective case-control study to evaluate 7-day CAP diagnosis among children 3 months to 18 years discharged from the ED with respiratory illness from 2011 to 2021 and who receive care at 4 hospital-affiliated primary care clinics. Logistic regression was performed to assess for predictors of 7-day CAP diagnosis. Seventy-four (0.7%, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.6%, 0.9%) of 10 329 children were diagnosed with CAP within 7 days, and fever at the index visit was associated with increased odds of diagnosis (odds ratio [OR] = 3.32, 95% CI = 1.75-6.28). Community-acquired pneumonia diagnosis after discharge from the ED with respiratory illness is rare, even among children who are febrile at time of initial evaluation.

Parent and Clinician Views on Not Using Antibiotics for Mild Community-Acquired Pneumonia

OBJECTIVES

Preschool-aged children with mild community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) routinely receive antibiotics even though most infections are viral. We sought to identify barriers to the implementation of a "no antibiotic" strategy for mild CAP in young children.

METHODS

Qualitative study using semistructured interviews conducted in a large pediatric hospital in the United States from January 2021 to July 2021. Parents of young children diagnosed with mild CAP in the previous 3 years and clinicians practicing in outpatient settings (pediatric emergency department, community emergency department, general pediatrics offices) were included.

RESULTS

Interviews were conducted with 38 respondents (18 parents, 20 clinicians). No parent heard of the no antibiotic strategy, and parents varied in their support for the approach. Degree of support related to their desire to avoid unnecessary medications, trust in clinicians, the emotional difficulty of caring for a sick child, desire for relief of suffering, willingness to accept the risk of unnecessary antibiotics, and judgment about the child's illness severity. Eleven (55%) clinicians were familiar with guidelines specifying a no antibiotic strategy. They identified challenges in not using antibiotics, including diagnostic uncertainty, consequences of undertreatment, parental expectations, follow-up concerns, and acceptance of the risks of unnecessary antibiotic treatment of many children if it means avoiding adverse outcomes for some children.

CONCLUSIONS

Although both parents and clinicians expressed broad support for the judicious use of antibiotics, pneumonia presents stewardship challenges. Interventions will need to consider the emotional, social, and logistical aspects of managing pneumonia, in addition to developing techniques to improve diagnosis.

Predictive value of clinician impression for readmission and postdischarge mortality among neonates and young children in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Monrovia, Liberia

BACKGROUND

There are no validated clinical decision aids to identify neonates and young children at risk of hospital readmission or postdischarge mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, leaving the decision to discharge a child to a clinician's impression. Our objective was to determine the precision of clinician impression to identify neonates and young children at risk for readmission and postdischarge mortality.

METHODS

We conducted a survey study nested in a prospective observational cohort of neonates and children aged 1-59 months followed 60 days after hospital discharge from Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania or John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia, Liberia. Clinicians who discharged each enrolled patient were surveyed to determine their perceived probability of the patient's risk of 60-day hospital readmission or postdischarge mortality. We calculated the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) to determine the precision of clinician impression for both outcomes.

RESULTS

Of 4247 discharged patients, 3896 (91.7%) had available clinician surveys and 3847 (98.7%) had 60-day outcomes available: 187 (4.8%) were readmitted and 120 (3.1%) died within 60 days of hospital discharge. Clinician impression had poor precision in identifying neonates and young children at risk of hospital readmission (AUPRC: 0.06, 95% CI: 0.04 to 0.08) and postdischarge mortality (AUPRC: 0.05, 95% CI: 0.03 to 0.08). Patients for whom clinicians attributed inability to pay for future medical treatment as the reason for risk for unplanned hospital readmission had 4.76 times the odds hospital readmission (95% CI: 1.31 to 17.25, p=0.02).

CONCLUSIONS

Given the poor precision of clinician impression alone to identify neonates and young children at risk of hospital readmission and postdischarge mortality, validated clinical decision aids are needed to aid in the identification of young children at risk for these outcomes.

Concordance in pathogen identification at the upper and lower respiratory tract of children with severe pneumonia

BACKGROUND

Nasopharyngeal swabs are taken to determine the causative agent of community acquired pneumonia (CAP), while the reliability of upper respiratory tract sampling as a proxy for lower respiratory tract infections is still unclear.

METHODS

Nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs, bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid samples and clinical data were collected from 153 hospitalized children between 3 months and 14 years of age with severe CAP, enrolled from March to June 2019. Written informed consent for the storage and use of the samples for further studies was obtained from the parents or caregivers. Putative pathogens were detected using a sensitive, high-throughput GeXP-based multiplex PCR and qPCR.

RESULTS

The same bacterial species in paired samples were found in 29 (23.4%) and the same viral species in 52 (27.5%) of the patients. moderate concordance was found for Mycoplasma pneumoniae (ĸ=0.64), followed by Haemophilus influenzae (ĸ=0.42). The strongest discordance was observed for human adenovirus and also for Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the latter was exclusively detected in BAL samples. In the adenovirus cases strong concordance was associated with high viral loads in the NP swabs.

CONCLUSION

The variation in concordance in pathogen detection in the upper and lower respiratory tract of children with severe pneumonia is generally high but varies depending on the species. Novel and impactful insights are the concordance between NP and BAL detection for M. pneumoniae and H. influenzae and the strong correlation between high adenoviral loads in NP swabs and detection in BAL fluid.

Factors associated with severe childhood community-acquired pneumonia: a retrospective study from two hospitals

Background

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is the leading cause of death in children globally. Indonesia is ranked 1st in South East Asia with the highest burden of pneumonia. Identification of risk factors is necessary for early intervention and better management. This study intended to describe CAP’s clinical signs and laboratory findings and explore the risk factors of severe CAP among children in Indonesia.

Methods

This was a retrospective study of childhood hospitalizations in Siloam General Hospitals and Siloam Hospitals Lippo Village from December 2015 to December 2019. Demographic data, clinical signs, and laboratory findings were collected and processed using IBM SPSS 26.0.

Results

This study included 217 participants with 66 (30.4%) severe pneumonia cases. Multivariate analysis shows that fever that lasts more than 7 days (ORadj = 4.95; 95%CI 1.61–15.21, Padj = 0.005) and increase in respiratory rate (ORadj = 1.05, 95%CI 1.01–1.08, Padj = 0.009) are two predictors of severe pneumonia. Meanwhile, a normal hematocrit level (ORadj = 0.9; 95%CI 0.83–0.98, Padj = 0.011) and children with normal BMI (ORadj = 0.7; 95%CI 0.57–0.84, Padj < 0.001) are significant independent predictors of severe pneumonia. The Hosmer-Lemeshow test shows that this model is a good fit with a P-value of 0.281. The AUC for this model is 0.819 (95%CI = 0.746–0.891, P-value < 0.001) which shows that this model has good discrimination.

Conclusion

Pediatric CAP hospitalizations with fever lasting > 7 days and tachypnea were at higher risk for progressing to severe pneumonia. A normal hematocrit level and a normal BMI are protective factors for severe pneumonia.

Pediatric sepsis phenotypes for enhanced therapeutics: An application of clustering to electronic health records

OBJECTIVE

The heterogeneity of pediatric sepsis patients suggests the potential benefits of clustering analytics to derive phenotypes with distinct host response patterns that may help guide personalized therapeutics. We evaluate the relative performance of latent class analysis (LCA) and K-means, 2 commonly used clustering methods toward the derivation of clinically useful pediatric sepsis phenotypes.

METHODS

Data were extracted from anonymized medical records of 6446 pediatric patients that presented to 1 of 6 emergency departments (EDs) between 2013 and 2018 and were thereafter admitted. Using International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-9 and ICD-10 discharge codes, 151 patients were identified with a sepsis continuum diagnosis that included septicemia, sepsis, severe sepsis, and septic shock. Using feature sets used in related clustering studies, LCA and K-means algorithms were used to derive 4 distinct phenotypic pediatric sepsis segmentations. Each segmentation was evaluated for phenotypic homogeneity, separation, and clinical use.

RESULTS

Using the 2 feature sets, LCA clustering resulted in 2 similar segmentations of 4 clinically distinct phenotypes, while K-means clustering resulted in segmentations of 3 and 4 phenotypes. All 4 segmentations identified at least 1 high severity phenotype, but LCA-identified phenotypes reflected superior stratification, high entropy approaching 1 (eg, 0.994) indicating excellent separation between estimated phenotypes, and differential treatment/treatment response, and outcomes that were non-randomly distributed across phenotypes (P < 0.001).

CONCLUSION

Compared to K-means, which is commonly used in clustering studies, LCA appears to be a more robust, clinically useful statistical tool in analyzing a heterogeneous pediatric sepsis cohort toward informing targeted therapies. Additional prospective studies are needed to validate clinical utility of predictive models that target derived pediatric sepsis phenotypes in emergency department settings.

PRO: Procalcitonin has clinical utility in children with community-acquired pneumonia

Procalcitonin (PCT) is a useful, albeit imperfect, diagnostic aid that can help clinicians make more informed decisions around antibiotic use in children with lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI), including community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Recent data suggest that a very low PCT concentration has a high negative predictive value to identify a population of children at low risk of typical bacterial infections. Although the preponderance of data on the clinical utility of PCT in LRTI come from adult studies, the potential for benefit is likely greatest in paediatric CAP and other LRTIs where viral aetiologies predominate, yet antibiotics are frequently prescribed.