Diagnosis of childhood pneumonia: clinical assessment without radiological confirmation may lead to overtreatment.

Objectives: Consensus guidelines discourage the use of routine radiologic confirmation of clinically diagnosed pneumonia in children. The goal of the present study was to assess the degree of antibiotic overtreatment resulting from this approach.

Design: This was a prospective data collection.

Setting: This was performed in 5 urgent care clinics in Jerusalem, Israel.

Participants: This study was composed of previously healthy children between 2 months and 18 years of age who presented with a chief complaint of fever, cough, or dyspnea between August 1, 2007, and March 15, 2008, by for whom chest x-rays were obtained because of clinical suspicion of pneumonia.

Outcome Measures: Outcome measure was percentage of children with clinical findings associated with pneumonia (hypoxia, tachypnea, rales, dyspnea) who did not have radiological findings of pneumonia.

Results: With the exception of wheezing, 55% to 65% of children with specific signs and symptoms did not have radiologic pneumonia. A similar range of children with a combination of the signs did not have radiologic pneumonia. For wheezing, alone or in combination, the percentages were higher. On multivariate analysis, only fever was found to be predictive of pneumonia. Wheezing was found to be negatively predictive.

Conclusions: Treatment of childhood pneumonia on the basis of clinical parameters alone with no chest x-ray confirmation may lead to a large portion of children receiving unnecessary antibiotic therapy. In an era when the emphasis is to decrease antibiotic resistance, radiological confirmation of pneumonia should be obtained when possible.