Cytokine Kinetics in the First Week of Tuberculosis Therapy as a Tool to Confirm a Clinical Diagnosis and Guide Therapy.

Background: Many patients treated for tuberculosis (TB) in low and middle income countries are treated based on clinical suspicion without bacteriological confirmation. This is often due to lack of rapid simple accurate diagnostics and low healthcare provider confidence in the predictive value of current tests. We previously reported in an animal TB model that levels of host markers rapidly change in response to treatment initiation.

Prognostic markers of meningococcal disease in children: recent advances and future challenges.

Meningococcal disease is a life-threatening condition and a major cause of bacterial meningitis and sepsis worldwide. In many fatal cases, meningococcal disease is rapidly progressive and death occurs within hours of the initial symptoms. The early identification of patients at high risk of death would be useful in order to provide aggressive and more personalized clinical management with the proper level of supportive therapy required, contributing to an improvement in the survival rate and reduction in sequelae.