Event Introduction:
Antibiotic resistance remains as a challenge to the majority of the countries in APAC region, and education on the how to adopt the judicious use of antibiotics is crucial. Several trials have shown that the infection marker, procalcitonin (PCT), is helpful in reducing antibiotic exposure without compromising patient safety. The American Association for Clinical chemistry has approved a guidance document on the clinical use of procalcitonin in 2023. This document aims to address the key questions related to the use of PCT in managing adult, pediatric, and neonatal patients with suspected sepsis and/or bacterial infections, particularly respiratory infections. Additionally, the document discusses analytical and preanalytical considerations for PCT analysis and confounding factors that may affect the interpretation of PCT results.
Learning Objectives:
- Overview of AACC(ADLM) guidance document – why PCT is the focus in this guidance document.
- Share the key messages from the guidance document
- Discuss the confounding factors that may affect the interpretation of PCT results
Andrea Kwa, PharmD
Associate Professor, Duke-NUS Medical School; Assistant Director (Research) Department of Pharmacy, Singapore
Dr Andrea Kwa graduated with a degree in Pharmacy from the National University of Singapore in 1996 and received her Doctor of Pharmacy Degree from the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in New York in 2006. Dr Kwa is currently a Pharmacy Clinician Scientist and Assistant Director, Pharmacy (Research), at the Singapore General Hospital. She is also a faculty member of the Emerging Infectious Diseases program at Duke-NUS Medical School. She specializes in critical care medicine, infectious diseases, and antimicrobial resistance research. Dr. Kwa helms a laboratory studying antimicrobial pharmacodynamics/pharmacokinetics and resistance. She also performs health services research involving antimicrobial stewardships, risk factors and outcomes of resistant infections. She has authored more than 60 publications and is a reviewer for many scientific journals.
Dr. Joshua Allen Hayden
Clinical Chemistry
Chief of Chemistry Norton Healthcare
Joshua Hayden, PhD, DABCC, FAACC, is the chief of chemistry at Norton Healthcare in Louisville, Kentucky. Prior to joining Norton, he was an assistant professor of pathology at Weill Cornell Medical College and director of the toxicology and therapeutic drug monitoring laboratory at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center. He earned his PhD in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and conducted postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before completing a two-year clinical chemistry fellowship at University of Washington. Joshua has special expertise developing and overseeing mass spectrometry assays in the clinical laboratory.
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