Enhancement of CURB65 score with proadrenomedullin (CURB65-A) for outcome prediction in lower respiratory tract infections: derivation of a clinical algorithm

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Adrenomedullin.

Proadrenomedullin (ProADM) confers additional prognostic information to established clinical risk scores in lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI).

The researchers aimed to derive a practical algorithm combining the CURB65 score with ProADM-levels in patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and non-CAP-LRTI.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 1359 patients taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

The researchers used data of 1359 patients with LRTI enrolled in a multicenter study.

A composite score (CURB65-A) was created combining CURB65 classes with ProADM cut-offs to further risk-stratify patients.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and multicenter study.

Because people in this Adrenomedullin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Running at several centres spread the Adrenomedullin study over different clinics and patient groups.

The researchers chose two ProADM cut-off values by assessing the association between ProADM levels and the risk of adverse events and mortality.

What Was Measured

Proadrenomedullin (ProADM) confers additional prognostic information to established clinical risk scores in lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI).

The researchers aimed to derive a practical algorithm combining the CURB65 score with ProADM-levels in patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and non-CAP-LRTI.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Adrenomedullin, Algorithms, Cohort Studies, Predictive Value of Tests, Prognosis, Protein Precursors and Respiratory Tract Infections.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and multicenter study of Adrenomedullin in 1359 patients.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 7 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2011 (BMC infectious diseases), a journal based in England.

More context: the Adrenomedullin compound page, all human trials.