C-Reactive Protein Velocity (CRPv) as a New Biomarker for the Early Detection of Acute Infection/Inflammation

Tal Levinson*, Asaf Wasserman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

28 Scopus citations

Abstract

C-reactive protein (CRP) is considered a biomarker of infection/inflammation. It is a commonly used tool for early detection of infection in the emergency room or as a point-of-care test and especially for differentiating between bacterial and viral infections, affecting decisions of admission and initiation of antibiotic treatments. As C-reactive protein is part of a dynamic and continuous inflammatory process, a single CRP measurement, especially at low concentrations, may erroneously lead to a wrong classification of an infection as viral over bacterial and delay appropriate antibiotic treatment. In the present review, we introduce the concept of C-reactive protein dynamics, measuring the velocity of C-reactive protein elevation, as a tool to increase this biomarker’s diagnostic ability. We review the studies that helped define new metrics such as estimated C-reactive protein velocity (velocity of C-reactive protein elevation from symptoms’ onset to first C-reactive protein measurement) and the measured C-reactive protein velocity (velocity between sequential C-reactive protein measurements) and the use of these metrics in different clinical scenarios. We also discuss future research directions for this novel metric.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8100
JournalInternational Journal of Molecular Sciences
Volume23
Issue number15
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2022

Keywords

  • C-reactive protein
  • bacterial
  • infection
  • inflammation
  • velocity
  • viral

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