Objectives: The early identification of patients at risk for severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) is crucial. Serum markers of disease severity have been assessed including interleukin (IL)-6 and IL-8; however, their predictive accuracy has varied significantly across studies. We conducted a meta-analysis to assess the accuracy of IL-6 and IL-8 at predicting SAP.
Methods: We identified relevant published articles and calculated pooled sensitivities, specificities and likelihood ratios using the random-effect model. We included values for days 1, 2 and 3 of presentation for IL-6 and for days 1 and 2 for IL-8. We also constructed summary receiver-operating curves and assessed the area under the curve (AUC) and the diagnostic odds ratios (DORs) as measures of diagnostic accuracy.
Results: For IL-6, we included 7 reports for day 1 and 4 reports for days 2 and 3. For IL-8, we analyzed 5 studies for day 1 and 4 for day 2. The pooled IL-6 sensitivities ranged between 81.0 and 83.6% and specificities between 75.6 and 85.3% with positive likelihood ratios of 3.43, 4.90 and 4.40 for days 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The IL-8 pooled sensitivities were 65.8 and 70.9% with specificities of 66.5 and 91.3% for days 1 and 2 with positive likelihood ratios of 1.96 and 8.15. The IL-6 AUCs were 0.75, 0.88 and 0.85 for days 1, 2 and 3. The IL-8 AUCs were 0.73 and 0.91 for days 1 and 2. The DOR for IL-6 was higher than that of IL-8 on day 1.
Conclusion: IL-6 and IL-8 seem to perform at an acceptable level in predicting SAP. Larger confirmatory studies formally comparing this performance with that of more commonly used markers are needed.
Copyright 2010 S. Karger AG, Basel.