Paediatric pneumonia: deriving a model to identify severe disease.

Background Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a leading cause of childhood hospitalisation. Limited data exist on factors predicting severe disease with no paediatric-specific predictive tools. Methods Retrospective cohort (2011–2016) of hospitalised CAP cases. We analysed clinical variables collected at hospital presentation against outcomes. Stratified outcomes were mild (hospitalised), moderate (invasive drainage procedure, intensive care) or severe (mechanical ventilation, vasopressors, death). Results We report 3330 CAP cases, median age 2.0 years (IQR 1–5 years), with 2950 (88.5%) mild, 305 (9.2%) moderate and 75 (2.3%) severe outcomes. Moderate-severe outcomes were associated with hypoxia (SaO2 Conclusions A clinical risk prediction tool is needed for child CAP. We have identified risk factors and derived a simple clinical tool using clinical variables at hospital presentation to determine a child’s risk of invasive or intensive care treatment with an ROC AUC comparable with adult pneumonia tools.