MODERN VIEWS ON THE PREVALENCE OF PNEUMONIA IN CHILDREN AND THE ROLE OF LABORATORY DIAGNOSIS: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

An analysis of domestic and foreign lit-erature on the prevalence, causes and mechanisms of pneu-monia in children. This article highlights the prevalence and features of the clinic and diagnosis of pneumonia in children based on a review of the literature. Out-of-hospi-tal pneumonia today remains a pressing medical and social problem, often leading to complications and often causing the death of children, both in Ukraine and around the world, so it needs more in-depth diagnosis. It is known that the severity of this disease depends on age, etiology, comorbidity and timely hospitalization. The incidence and prevalence of respiratory diseases is one of the main indicators of health among children in the world.There-fore, the purpose of this research is to analyze foreign and domestic literature sources on the prevalence and search for the most informative diagnostic criteria for pneumonia in young children. More recent meta-analyzes of etiologi-cal data indicate a change in the profile of the pathogen, which increases the recognition that community-acquired pneumonia is caused by sequential or simultaneous inter-action of more than one microorganism. Given the epide-miology of community-acquired pneumonia and long-term hospital stays, the study and synthesis of data on the diagnostic criteria for community-acquired pneumonia re-mains relevant. It is currently not possible to identify a sin-gle marker or clinical sign that can be used to distinguish bacterial from viral pneumonia. It is important to evaluate all indicators of objective, instrumental and laboratory ex-amination. Based on literature data, cytokine status indica-tors can be used to prevent the development of complica-tions from pneumonia, prescribe adequate therapy and de-termine the duration of treatment.There are many other biomarkers that have been linked to the severity of pneu-monia in children.According to statistics, a study of chil-dren with COVID-19 showed that the blood of patients, especially those with severe disease, has high levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, especially IL-6, which during in-fection may be a key cytokine that causes serious inflam-mation and acute damage to many organs and systems. In particular, such a biomarker is IL-6 -the only serum cyto-kine, the presence of which probably correlates with the severity of pneumonia.The relationship between serum IL-6 and IL-10 levels is an important diagnostic criterion for determining the severity of pneumonia in children on admission, which allows screening for the risk of compli-cations and assessing the possibility of rapid recovery. The use of immune and inflammatory markers in children with pneumonia can potentially lead to the development of in-novative methods for predicting complications of commu-nity-acquired pneumonia and determining the severity.In addition, it has been shown that serum IL-6 levels are sig-nificantly reduced in patients with pneumonia during the recovery period, which allows to evaluate the effectiveness of treatment. Procalcitonin is also an important indicator of the inflammatory process. There are conflicting data on the ability of procalcitonin to distinguish between bacterial and viral infections. Given these data, procalcitonin can be used as a diagnostic criterion for the presence of bacterial infection and the appropriateness of antibiotic therapy. Analysis of available scientific works on prevalence fea-tures of the clinic and diagnosis of pneumonia in children, showed that the issue of timely diagnosis and differential diagnosis of pneumonia in children is still relevant and re-quires further research.