On the floors its often used by rheumatologists or ID to trend infections

Yep! For diagnostic purposes, it’s pointless. For trending purposes when you know what disease process is occurring, it’s great. Good example, I have UC, my doctor does a CBC and a CRP every 6 months to monitor it.

CRP is sensitive not specific

ie it confirms you have inflammation but does not narrow down the etiology

I work as a doctor at a hospital emergency department. Mostly internal medicine cases but also the occasional minor trauma and acute abdomen. CRP is practically ordered from every patient routinely over here. It's very good for first line diagnostics, where you first assess whether it's an infection/inflammation or not. It's quite valuable to both know when the patients CRP is elevated and when it's low, because it directs further diagnostics. The test itself is dirt cheap.

It may be indeed provider based, though. I live in Europe so we may have a different methodologies. Where i live emergency departments are often separated into internal, surgical and general practice departments. The GP "emergencies" are usually minor issues and there we don't take CRP routinely. The emergency dept. I work at takes in patients with referrals (mainly by GPs) so it may be that we have a higher incidence of informative CRP counts because of selection.



It's also highly specific for inflammation. It's not specific to the cause of inflammation apart from somewhat differentiating between a bacterial and a viral infection.



It doesn't indeed confirm diagnoses, but you can't say it's a useless diagnostic tool, because it can tell you the severity of an infection, and is a highly specific marker for inflammation. Low CRP on a clearly sick patient is valuable info, for example. Obviously you need to be able to match it with other findings.

UC meaning ulcerative colitis? What's CBC?

This post was edited by Neptunus on Jan 15 2019 04:29pm

double post

This post was edited by Neptunus on Jan 15 2019 04:27pm

It stands for complete blood count, you probably call it H & H where your from I'm guessing.

UC = ulcerative colitis.

This post was edited by dogboston on Jan 15 2019 04:41pm

Well since you all are bumping this here is a update.

Dr called me today and said I have Helicobacter pylori Infection

Its infection of the stomach. When they ran the endoscope down me he took biopsy samples of it and sent it off to the best of my understanding. They called me today and said it was positive for Helicobacter pylori Infection.

I picked my medicine up earlier 2 different antibiotics and some stomach pills. 8 pills per day to try and kill this infection in me.

My gallbladder is working 61 percent said it dont need to come out at this moment. My pancreas still hurts as I think I still have pancreatis it hasn't healed since around Thanksgiving. So I guess now I try to fight the Helicobacter pylori Infection and try and cure it and maybe my pancreas will start feeling better

h-pylori is a pain in the ass man.. Glad to hear that they narrowed it down though.

Ah okay. I was just wondering why not take calprotectin every now and then, it's a good indicator of intestinal inflammation. I don't know much about IBD though.

CRP is just as good of an indicator if they already know what they're tracking. I also get scoped pretty frequently, was yearly when I was diagnosed and now its every 3 years. I'm sure if I began complaining of symptoms, they'd order a stool specimen or occult stool.

Not 100% sure why my gastro doesn't run that test, I assume that being asymptomatic and 0 occult blood is a strong enough indicator.