Evaluation of Some Immunological Tests for Early Diagnosis of Bacterial Neonatal Sepsis

Abstract

Neonatal sepsis is a major cause of death in newborns despite sophisticated neonatal intensive care. This crosssection study was done on 69 neonates with suspected sepsis who were admitted in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) of Maternity and Child Teaching Hospital at AL-Diwaniya city, and 20 healthy neonates as a (control group) in the period from March to October 2009. This study was conducted to evaluate the diagnostic value of some immunological marker such as (CRP,IL-6, IL-8,TNF- α, in the early diagnosis of neonatal sepsis prior to the blood culture ( the golden standard test). The culture positivity rate 20 (28.9%) among suspected sepsis neonates, the male more affected than female among proven sepsis. it was found that the median concentration of CRP, TNF-α, IL-8, IL-6 decreased in order of definitive infection, clinical sepsis and healthy subjects respectively (P<0.001), and found that the TNF-α (≥65.4pg/l) followed by IL-8 (≥60.9pg/l) were better than IL-6 and CRP with sensitivity of (80%) and (75%) respectively and negative predictive value of (97%) and (94.1%) respectively when used as a tests to predict culture positive sepsis cases differentiating them from culture negative sepsis cases .