The role of markers of systemic inflammatory response in the postoperative period. Review

Despite all the achievements of modern surgery, the number of postoperative infectious complications in the world remains high. Their occurrence leads to a longer period of patients’ hospitalization, requires the use of additional medical and diagnostic measures, which ultimately leads to higher treatment costs and significant financial losses in the health care system. Therefore, it is important to identify postoperative complications at an early stage, even before the development of pronounced clinical symptoms, and to predict their possible development in a certain category of patients. For these purposes, scientists try to use various laboratory markers. In this paper, we analyzed both well-known indicators of the inflammatory response, such as: C-reactive protein, albumin, their ratio, procalcitonin and interleukin-6, and relatively new parameters that research teams are trying to apply for these purposes: neutrophil granularity intensity and neutrophil reactivity intensity, pancreatic stone protein and pancreatitis-associated protein. We tried to collect the most complete information available at the moment, evaluate the opinions of researchers, identify contradictions in their works and try to explain their cause. As a result, it turned out that even the markers of inflammation known for many years are not absolutely specific for postoperative infectious complications. We concluded that most of the laboratory parameters described in this article can be used to some extent in the early diagnosis of postoperative infectious complications, but if we want to obtain more complete information in this area of knowledge, it is necessary to conduct new largescale studies.