Clinical Prediction Rule to Guide Diagnostic Testing for and Improve Antibiotic Stewardship for Pediatric Diarrhea.

BACKGROUND

Diarrheal diseases are a leading cause of death for children aged <5 years. Identification of etiology helps guide pathogen-specific therapy, but availability of diagnostic testing is often limited in low-resource settings. Our goal is to develop a clinical prediction rule (CPR) to guide clinicians in identifying when to use a point-of-care (POC) diagnostic for in children presenting with acute diarrhea.

METHODS

We used clinical and demographic data from the Global Enteric Multicenter Study (GEMS) study to build predictive models for diarrhea of etiology in children aged ≤59 months presenting with moderate to severe diarrhea in Africa and Asia. We screened variables using random forests, and assessed predictive performance with random forest regression and logistic regression using cross-validation. We used the Etiology, Risk Factors, and Interactions of Enteric Infections and Malnutrition and the Consequences for Child Health and Development (MAL-ED) study to externally validate our GEMS-derived CPR.

RESULTS

Of the 5011 cases analyzed, 1332 (27%) had diarrhea of etiology. Our CPR had high predictive ability (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve = 0.80 [95% confidence interval, .79-.81]) using the top 2 predictive variables, age and caregiver-reported bloody diarrhea. We show that by using our CPR to triage who receives diagnostic testing, 3 times more diarrhea cases would have been identified compared to current symptom-based guidelines, with only 27% of cases receiving a POC diagnostic test.

CONCLUSIONS

We demonstrate how a CPR can be used to guide use of a POC diagnostic test for diarrhea management. Using our CPR, available diagnostic capacity can be optimized to improve appropriate antibiotic use.