Ep 212 PECARN Febrile Young Infant Prediction Tool: When To Safely Forgo LP and Empiric Antibiotics

If you’ve been practicing EM for more than a decade, your approach to the febrile young infant has (appropriately) evolved. For years, the default was LP + empiric antibiotics + admission for almost everyone. That approach prevented missing meningitis, but at the cost of a lot of harm: invasive testing, unnecessary antibiotics, and hospitalization-related complications. The modern approach is a paradigm shift toward risk stratification, biomarkers, and shared decision-making, while still respecting one immutable truth: Missing neonatal bacterial meningitis can be catastrophic. This episode revisits the framework from a prior EM Cases episode and updates it with a landmark study that directly informs how far we can safely go—especially in the 0–28 day group, with the father of multiple well-known PECARN rules Dr. Nathan Kuppermann and lead author Dr. Brett Burstein...

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Ep 212 PECARN Febrile Young Infant Prediction Tool: When To Safely Forgo LP and Empiric Antibiotics is an episode from Emergency Medicine Cases by Dr. Anton Helman.

This episode is 47:36 long.

This episode was published on Jan 27, 2026.

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