Hemoglobin Evaluation in Kawasaki Disease

Data in this study are presented as the mean ± standard error. For continuous variables, we adopted the independent t-test to compare the differences between KD and FC. Hemoglobin references vary among ages [31 (link),32 (link)], and we used the reference for hemoglobin versus age [32 (link)]. The z-score of hemoglobin was corrected for age, and the standard deviation was included to execute the calculation [33 (link)]. The z-score is positive if the value is higher than the mean and negative if it is lower. We used the area under the receiver operating characteristic (auROC) curve to differentiate the parameters used to predict KD or FC. The best possibility of a cut-off value was declared using Youden’s Index. Meanwhile, we used the univariate or multivariate logistic regression model to identify significant independent markers for KD. All statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS version 22.0 for Windows XP (SPSS, Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). The two-sided p-value less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant in this study.