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TOPLINE:

Most children hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia can reach clinical stability within 24 hours. Those who are older or possibly dehydrated tend to have longer recovery times, a new study showed.

METHODOLOGY:

• To assess time to clinical stability in children with pneumonia, researchers analyzed data from the CARPE DIEM study, which enrolled patients from July 2013 to December 2017.
• Their analysis focused on 571 children aged 3 months to 18 years (median age, 3.1 years).
• Clinical stability was assessed on the basis of normalization of four parameters: Temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation.

TAKEAWAY:

• About 67% of the children had reached clinical stability on all four parameters at the time of discharge from the hospital, whereas 25% still had one abnormal parameter, and 7% had two abnormal parameters.
• The median length of stay was 18.2 hours for patients with mild disease; 40.8 hours for patients with moderate disease, including those who received intravenous (IV) hydration or supplemental oxygen; and nearly 70 hours for those with severe disease.
• Factors associated with lower odds of reaching clinical stability within 24 hours included older age (adjusted odds ratio, 0.96), vomiting (0.77), and prolonged capillary refill (0.77).

IN PRACTICE:

"Older children and those admitted for IV fluids and potential dehydration may improve slower than other patients," the authors of the study wrote. "Patients without these factors might be candidates for management on an observation or short-stay unit."

SOURCE:

Madeline Field, MD, with the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was the corresponding author of the paper. The study was published online on April 15 in Pediatrics.

LIMITATIONS:

The single-center design of the study may limit the generalizability of the findings.

DISCLOSURES:

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health. The authors had no relevant conflicts of interest to disclose.

This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.