Clinical experience with the C-Reactive Protein Test

There are situations in which it is important to the physician to know whether or not his patient has an inflammatory or tissue-destroying process. Time-honored aids to the solution of this problem have been the patient's temperature, leucocyte count, and erythrocyte sedimentation rate. Recently the detection of the C-reactive protein in human blood has been gaining attention as an index to inflammation or tissue destruction within the body. This procedure has been used especially for the determination of activity in rheumatic fever.* It has been shown that it is a sensitive guide to rheumatic inflammation, that it disappears after suppression of clinical signs and symptoms of activity with either salicylates or steroid therapy, and that it reappears if there is a clinical relapse. The times of disappearance and reappearance ordinarily precede the corresponding change in the erythrocyte sedimentation rate. The C-reactive protein has not been reported in the serum of