Assessing Effectiveness of Community Acquired Pneumonia Treatment by Continuous Pneumonia Severity Score

Community acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a common respiratory infection and is the main cause of ICU admission and death in adults. Because of most patients were treated empirically against suspected causative microorganism, it is important to assess the effectiveness of treatment after 3 days of anti-infective therapy. However, the criteria for treatment failure is lack of a clear-cut and validated definition from the CAP guidelines. Pneumonia severity scores is a wide-used severity rating system for treatment selection and outcome prediction for CAP. So far, the pneumonia severity scores only used once before the treatment started. Considering the pneumonia severity scores could reflect the severity of pneumonia, it is reasonable to assume that the change of pneumonia severity scores could reflect the patients' condition and the effectiveness of the treatment. This trail will be designed to validate the feasibility of assessing effectiveness of CAP treatment by using continuous pneumonia severity score.