In response to the case report of allergic enterocolitis in a preterm neonate: how prevalent is systemic eosinophilia with NEC?

摘要

While investigating the factors associated with mortality in neonates with necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), we noted with interest the case report by Srinivasan et al. describing episodic allergic enteritis in a preterm infant associated with corresponding elevated eosinophil counts. To our knowledge, eosinophils in stool remain the hallmark of allergic enterocolitis, but we were intrigued with the idea that systemic eosinophil elevation might be a reliable finding for this disease entity in preterm infants. Because we were working with a large dataset (Pediatrix Clinical Data Warehouse) consisting of predominantly preterm infants, we wondered if eosinophilia might reliably correlate with allergic enterocolitis and thus, if used as a surrogate identifier, whether or not it might identify a subset of NEC consistent with that diagnosis. To that end, we separated our population of NEC patients into all those with available eosinophil counts at time of NEC diagnosis < 10% or>=10%. Our results can be seen in the following Table 1.