Is urinary 5-HIAA determination a valuable method in diagnosis of acute appendicitis in children?
The aim of the study is to investigate the significance of spot urine 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA) levels in patients admitted with the suspicion of acute appendicitis. Seventy-one patients with the mean age of 9.4±2.9 years, who were admitted to our pediatric surgery clinic between August 20...
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Published in | Journal of Indian Association of Pediatric Surgeons Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 35 - 38 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
India
Medknow Publications on behalf of the Indian Association of Pediatric Surgeons
01.01.2006
Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | The aim of the study is to investigate the significance of spot urine
5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA) levels in patients admitted with
the suspicion of acute appendicitis. Seventy-one patients with the mean
age of 9.4±2.9 years, who were admitted to our pediatric surgery
clinic between August 2002 and March 2004 with the complaints of
abdominal pain were evaluated prospectively. Additionally spot urine
samples were collected from 34 healthy children for control. 5-HIAA was
detected from the urine samples in all children with high-performance
liquid chromatography (HPLC) method. The results were analyzed with one
way analysis of variance (ANOVA), post hoc Tukey HSD test and receiver
operating characteristic (ROC) curve. After the clinical follow-up
appendicitis was detected in 40 patients and abdominal pain was found
to be due to causes other than appendicitis in 31 patients. Results
were found to be correlative with the final diagnosis in all patients.
The mean 5-HIAA levels were 2.5±1.8 μmol/dl in healthy
children, whereas 9±5 μmol/dl in nonappendicitis and
18.9±17.8 μmol/dl in appendicitis patients, respectively. The
difference between the patients with acute appendicitis and the other
two groups were statistically significant ( P = 0.001). For a value of
8.9 μmol/dl, this test was found to be 70% sensitive and 67%
specific according to the ROC curve. 5-HIAA significantly rises in
pediatric acute appendicitis. However, due to high values of SD and
relatively low sensitivity and specificity, this test seems to have
limited diagnostic power as a single parameter in childhood acute
appendicitis. |
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ISSN: | 0971-9261 1998-3891 |
DOI: | 10.4103/0971-9261.24636 |