Fever in Young Infants

This review aimed to identify when to initiate testing and treatment for herpes simplex virus infection.

The authors highlight the historical context of febrile infant management, review important definitions and terminology, discuss the most clinically relevant viral and bacterial causes of fever in the young infant, describe current risk stratification tools guiding medicaldecision making, and outline research and clinical practice improvement priorities for improving the management of the febrile young infant.

Newer laboratory investigations such as C-reactive protein and procalcitonin have favorable test characteristics compared with traditional laboratory studies such as a white blood cell count. These novel biomarkers have not gained widespread acceptance because of lack of robust prospectively collected data, varying thresholds to define positivity, and differing inclusion criteria across studies. However, C-reactive protein and procalcitonin, when combined with other patient characteristics in the step-by-step approach, have a high sensitivity for detection of serious bacterial infection.

This study aimed to analyze a large group of febrile neonates 28 days or younger who received outpatient sepsis evaluation and nasopharyngeal aspirate antigen testing (NPAT) for respiratory syncytial viral (RSV) infection to determine whether there is a clinically significant association between viral study results and risk for serious bacterial infection (SBI: bacterial meningitis, bacteremia, urinary tract infection, bacterial enteritis).

The objective of the study was to systematically evaluate existing evidence of the diagnostic utility of biomarkers for prediction of sepsis in neonates.

This review describes diagnostic and therapeutic advances for infants with herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) and 2 (HSV-2).

The objectives of this systematic review and meta-analysis were to determine: 1) the ability of serum procalcitonin concentrations to identify febrile infants < 91 days of age at high and low risk for serious bacterial infections, and 2) to compare its utility with available clinical prediction rules.

Objectives: To review the evidence for diagnostic accuracy of screening for serious bacterial illness (SBI) and invasive herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection in febrile infants 3 months or younger; ascertain harms and benefits of various management strategies; compare prevalence of SBI and HSV between different clinical settings; determine how well the presence of viral infection predicts against SBI; and review evidence on parental compliance to return for followup assessments (infants less than 6 months).

This review discusses challenges and new approaches to assessment and management of febrile children with suspected serious bacterial infections.

The objective of this systematic review was to determine the accuracy of C-reactive protein (CRP) for diagnosing serious bacterial and bacterial infections in infants and children presenting with fever.

The objective of this systematic review was to evaluate the agreement between temperature measured at the axilla and rectum in children and young people.