الفهرس 
Aim of the workOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Pneumonias account for almost one in five deaths in children under the age of five years worldwide each year- the largest from a single disease, as it is accounting for almost 28–34% of all under-5 deaths globally
This makes the pneumonia the single largest contributor to child mortality, and refers to the urgent need for an effective programme which may help in early identification of the disease and reducing this high mortality rate.
Many studies had been done worldwide using simple clinical signs, laboratory and radiological findings to detect the most helpful parameters in early prediction of pneumonia.
They have reported simple clinical signs as chest indrawing, rapid breathing and auscultatory crepitations to be signs of diagnosis of pneumonia with variable sensitivities to appear early in the course of the disease.
In this research, a study has been done on 900 patients, their age ranged from 2 months up to less than five years, came to Minia university hospital between May 2011 and December 2011 with a complaint of cough or difficult breathing of less than 30 days duration.
We have selected simple clinical signs (as rapid breathing, fever, vomiting, refusal of feeding, chest indrawing, bronchial breathing and crepitations), simple laboratory findings (as raised C-reactive protein titre and white blood cell count > 20,000 cell/mm3) and radiological findings as simple 10 parameters which can be used in early prediction of pneumonia among the study group
This occurred through two settings followed by admission for patients with suspicion of pneumonia, with 48h in-between, in which we assessed the patients for the presence of the ten parameters of our study and knowing their related sensitivities and specificities for early prediction of pneumonia.
Our results showed that 50 patient out of the all 900 patients of the study were having a suspicion of pneumonia which reflect the prevalence of pneumonia in our community among children with respiratory symptoms, which found to be (6%).
After admission, careful examination and investigations had been carried out for these 50 patients with a suspicion of pneumonia in order to detect the sensitivity and specificity of each parameter of our study.
We had found that rapid breathing (defined as respiratory rate of 40 breathe per minute or more in children aged from 1 year up to 5 years and a respiratory rate of 50 breathe per minute or more in infants aged from 2months up to 1 year) is the most sensitive indicator for early prediction of pneumonia (sensitivity 86%, and specificity 100% “as gold stander for the study”) and it is an easy sign to be learned and detected.