Procalcitonin-guided antibiotic therapy may shorten length of treatment and may improve survival-a systematic review and meta-analysis.

"Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participateNo ethics approval was required for this systematic review with meta-analysis, as all data were already published in peer-reviewed journals. No patients were involved in the design, conduct or interpretation of our study. Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing interests. Consent for publicationNot applicable. Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests."

"Funding Open access funding provided by Semmelweis University. The project was partially supported by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office (K 138816). No other sponsors had a role in the design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, and manuscript preparation."

"We report our systematic review and meta-analysis based on the recommendations of the PRISMA 2020 guideline [] (see Additional file : Table S1), while we followed the Cochrane Handbook []. The protocol of the study was registered on PROSPERO (registration number CRD42022374605), and we adhered to it except for one additional outcome measure (rate of secondary infection) and two subgroup analyses (PCT protocol and patient population)."