Molecular Distance to Health Transcriptional Score and Disease Severity in Children Hospitalized with Community-Acquired Pneumonia

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a leading cause of hospitalization and mortality in children. Diagnosis remains challenging and there are no reliable tools to objectively classify patients according to disease severity or predict clinical outcomes. Molecular distance to health (MDTH) is a genomic score that measures the global perturbation of the transcriptional profile that may help classify patients by disease severity. We assessed the value of MDTH to assess disease severity in children hospitalized with CAP. 172 total samples (152 CAP samples, 20 matched healthy control samples)