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‹ Tue · 19 May 2026
Promising but preliminary

Evaluation of serum progranulin as a biomarker for early detection of neonatal sepsis in a microbiological context

A blood protein detected newborn sepsis with 98% sensitivity, outperforming standard tests in a small Egyptian cohort, awaiting larger validation.

Serum progranulin demonstrated excellent diagnostic accuracy (AUC 0.986, sensitivity 98.31%) for early neonatal sepsis detection in a case-control study of 90 neonates in Egypt, outperforming both PCT and CRP. While promising, the study is limited by small n=90 and single-center setting; independent prospective validation in larger diverse cohorts is required.

What the study was

Study design
Case-control diagnostic accuracy study
Population
Neonates with clinically suspected sepsis (n=60) vs healthy controls (n=30), Egypt
Sample size
90
Category
Diagnostics
Maturity
Exploratory
Journal
Scientific Reports

Why it surfaced

Excellent AUC (0.986) but small n=90, single-center. Assigned to CBC-based diagnostics topic as proxy (serum biomarker for sepsis diagnosis). Requires prospective multicenter validation.

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