Trauma and Emergency Care

Insights on more effective – and less-invasive – testing in the peds ER

In 2001 UC Davis Department of Emergency Medicine and pediatrics professor Nathan Kuppermann helped to create the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network or PECARN, the nation’s only federally-funded pediatric emergency care research network. Kuppermann and his colleagues have played key roles since in developing new guidance about CT scanning children with minor head trauma and a host of other important clinical questions in pediatric emergency departments.

That work continued last year, when Kuppermann co-led a PECARN study that established a proof of principle for a promising, less-invasive method of determining when babies with fevers have bacterial infections. Published in an August 2016 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the study focused on high-throughput RNA analysis, a diagnostic test that may someday help to reduce invasive exams, hospitalizations and antibiotic treatments.


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