Title

Utility of procalcitonin versus CRP in early sepsis detection

Authors

Rajesh Kumar Jha, Asim Shekhar & Amit Kumar Prasad*

Affiliation

Department of Anaesthesiology, RDJM Medical College & Hospital, Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India; *Corresponding author

Email

Rajesh Kumar Jha - E-mail: rajeshjha93@gmail.com

Asim Shekhar - E-mail: ashekhar05@gmail.com

Amit Kumar Prasad - E-mail: bablooprasad11@gmail.com

Article Type

Research Article

Date

Received April 1, 2026; Revised April 30, 2026; Accepted April 30, 2026, Published April 30, 2026
 

Abstract

Early sepsis detection remains challenging despite biomarker advances, with CRP widely used but PCT emerging as superior for bacterial infections in emergency settings. Therefore, it is of interest to compare the diagnostic accuracy of PCT and CRP in 284 emergency patients with suspected sepsis, using Sepsis-3 criteria and ROC analysis within 2 hours of presentation. PCT achieved higher AUC (0.847, 95% CI 0.812-0.882) versus CRP (0.721, 95% CI 0.680-0.762; p<0.001), with optimal cutoffs PCT 0.5 ng/mL and CRP 50 mg/L showing similar sensitivity (78.2% versus 82.1) but PCT superior specificity. Septic patients exhibited markedly elevated PCT (median 2.8±4.2 ng/mL versus 0.3±0.8 ng/mL, p<0.001) and a faster peak time (6.2±2.1h versus 12.4±4.8h, p<0.001) than CRP. These data shows PCT's superior early diagnostic performance for emergency sepsis and thus supporting its adoption as a primary biomarker over CRP.

Keywords

Sepsis, procalcitonin (PCT), C-reactive protein (CRP), biomarkers, diagnostic accuracy, emergency medicine

Citation

Jha et al. Bioinformation 22(4): 2185-2189 (2026)

Edited by

Vini Mehta

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.