Association between fecal calprotectin level and mesenteric adenopathy in children

Abstract

Mesenteric adenopathy is the inflammation of lymphatic nodes causing their unspecific hypertrophy. Moreover, it seems that considering the increase of fecal calprotectin demonstrates a gastrointestinal inflammation, it can be used as a diagnostic method in mesenteric adenopathy. Therefore, the current study was conducted to evaluate the association between fecal calprotectin and mesenteric adenopathy in children.

Methods & Materials: Through an inferential cross-sectional study, those children admitted with abdominal pain to Tabriz childeren hospital were included. Then, the patients were allocated into two groups of case and control. The case group consisted of those children attending with a history of abdominal pain and in sonographic evaluations mesenteric adenopathy was reported. Control group consisted of those patients evaluated with sonography due to non-gastrointestinal causes such as renal disease or a hernia and the sonographic studies reported to be normal. The demographic characteristics and fecal calprotectin were assessed in both groups and get compared with each other. The correlation of fecal calprotectin with the size of lymph nodes reported in sonography and their number was also evaluated. Analysis of the data was done by SPSS version 22.

Results: In this study, 119 children were included which 47 patients were in the control group and 71 patients were in the case group. Fifty-five patients (45.8%) were male and 64 patients (54.2%) were female. Mean age was 6.5 +/- 2.8 years. In laboratory evaluations median fecal calprotectin of case group was 50 μg/g ranging 6.5 – 1800 μg/g which was significantly higher than that in control group (median=25, rang 5 – 1000 μg/g) (p=0.001). Optimal cut off point was measured as 46.7 μg/g with 61 percent sensitivity and 78 percent specificity.