Possible Role of Procalcitonin as Inflammatory Biomarker in Bovine andEquine Species

摘要

During the course of evolution, the immune system has eventually developed to deal with infectious pathogen invasions by various host defense mechanisms. Inflammatory response is one of the primary responses to a microbial invasion, which leads to thesystemic illness which is referred to as sepsis.1 Since the American College of Chest Physicians/Society of Critical Care Medicine Consensus Conference in 1991, the term sepsis has been defined as the 'systemic inflammatory response to infection.'2 Theexpression 'systemic inflammatory response syndrome' (SIRS) describes a clinical condition that represents the culmination of the activation of a complex network of acute endogenous mediators of sepsis from endothelial cells, monocytes, macrophages neutrophils and plasma cell precursors, which lead to uncontrolled and widespread inflammation.3 Clinical symptoms of sepsis include tachycardia, tachypnea, fever, leukocytosis, etc. Usually, severe sepsis is accompanied with hypoperfusion or dysfunction of at least one organ. Sepsis associated with multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS) or hypotension is known as septic shock.4 Despite decades of scientific researching, sepsis still represents a huge sanitary and economical problem in both human and veterinary medicine.5-5 Moreover, considering global trends of increasing antimicrobial resistance in both Gram-positive and Gram-negative organisms, much effort has been directed toward identification of biomarkers that are useful in the differential diagnosis of sepsis and other infectious conditions.5-7 An ideal biomarker needs to be a more rapid diagnostic tool, to be able to discriminate between normal or pathologic process, and to give information about response to a pharmacologic or otherwise therapeutic intervention.