EUCLIDS consortium.
Fever is the most common reason that children present to Emergency Departments. Clinical signs and symptoms suggestive of bacterial infection are often non-specific, and there is no definitive test for the accurate diagnosis of infection. The ‘omics’ approaches to identifying biomarkers from the host-response to bacterial infection are promising. In this study, lipidomic analysis was carried out with plasma samples obtained from febrile children with confirmed bacterial infection (n = 20) and confirmed viral infection (n = 20). We show for the first time that bacterial and viral infection produces distinct profile in the host lipidome. Some species of glycerophosphoinositol, sphingomyelin, lysophosphatidylcholine and cholesterol sulfate were higher in the confirmed virus infected group, while some species of fatty acids, glycerophosphocholine, glycerophosphoserine, lactosylceramide and bilirubin were lower in the confirmed virus infected group when compared with confirmed bacterial infected group. A combination of three lipids achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.911 (95% CI 0.81 to 0.98). This pilot study demonstrates the potential of metabolic biomarkers to assist clinicians in distinguishing bacterial from viral infection in febrile children, to facilitate effective clinical management and to the limit inappropriate use of antibiotics.
This work was partially supported by the European Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7) under EUCLIDS Grant Agreement no. 279185. ICED: The Research was supported by the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre based at Imperial College. This work was further supported by the Medical Research Council and National Institute for Health Research [grant number MC_PC_12025] through funding for the MRC-NIHR National Phenome Centre, infrastructure support was provided by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at Imperial NHS Healthcare Trust. MK acknowledges funding from the Wellcome Trust (Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship grant 206508/Z/17/Z).