A study on high sensitive C-Reactive protein as a diagnostic marker in preschool asthmatics

: Childhood asthma has a hazardous impact on the growth, social & emotional aspect of the life thereby affecting the quality of life. Hence, early diagnosis & identification of symptoms can help prevent the co-morbidities. High sensitive C-Reactive protein (hsCRP) a known marker of systemic inflammation is evaluated in the current study as a marker of asthma in the preschool children.To evaluate the efficacy of serum hsCRP as a diagnostic marker & to find out the correlation of serum hsCRP level among the different grades of severity of asthma in pre-school children.A cross-sectional analytical study was designed with 811 samples equally divided between the case & health matched control groups.GINA-2018 definition was used to recruit subjects & classify the severity. One time serum hsCRP was estimated in the subjects among both the cases & controls, & correlated with other variables in the study.A total of 811 participants were included in the final analysis with 402participants in asthmatics category & 409 participants in healthy children category. Out of the 402 asthmatics,362 (90.05%) subjects tested to be positive(higher than 3mg/L) & only 40 subjects (9.95%) were negative. Similarly out of 409 healthy subjects, only 36 (8.8%) were positive while majority i.e. 373(91.2%) were found to be negative. The test was evaluated to be having a sensitivity of 90.05%, specificity of93.32% with a diagnostic accuracy of 91.66%. The diagnostic accuracy of hsCRP in severe asthma was 63%, & the specificity was 58%, whereas in case of mild asthma it was79% & 73% respectively with statistical significance. hsCRP is a reliable diagnostic marker in preschool asthmatics to besides clinical correlates.