Biomarkers may be characterized as diagnostic, distinguishing between two states (say, infected or non-infected); prognostic, informing of a likely outcome (say, mortality); or predictive, if a treatment effect is differential between biomarker positivity and negativity [1]. One of the most discussed biomarkers in the infectious diseases and critical care literature is procalcitonin [2][3][4], a polypeptide that serves as the precursor for calcitonin in thyroid gland C cells and is released in response to microbial toxins and pro-inflammatory mediators [5]. Procalcitonin qualifies as both a diagnostic (an infection or sepsis marker) and predictive (a guide to antimicrobial therapy) biomarker. This being said, procalcitonin biomarker performance has been subjected to a large number of meta-analyses [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], suggesting a degree of disquiet regarding the actual level of evidence for procalcitonin utility.We first summarize certain key parameters of procalcitonin performance as a diagnostic biomarker in 6 meta-analyses, conducted between the years of 2004-2015; author sub-group analyses are not considered (Table 1) [11,14,[16][17][18][19]. Where reported, heterogeneity was a marked feature, even when restricted to a more circumscribed population of the "critically ill"; the components of heterogeneity presumably reflecting such factors as different procalcitonin assays and threshold levels, patient subgroups, endpoint prevalence, primary study inclusions and exclusions, and study quality / bias [5]. Analytic methods reflected year of publication, with the earlier studies [16][17][18][19] using the linear regression model of Moses et al, as opposed to the mixed-effects bivariate approach of the two more recent studies [11,14]; a point of importance for Wacker and co-authors [14]. Overall, the diagnostic performance could at best be described as modest, a point conceded by some of the authors [11,16,18] and reiterated by Afshari and Harbath [22], commenting upon the somewhat fulsome conclusions of Wacker et al. [14]. The former noted that the sensitivity of 77% corresponded to 23% of patients not receiving adequate therapy and a specificity of 79% corresponded to 21% being unnecessarily treated (Table 1); similarly, a positive likelihood ratio of 3.67 and a negative likelihood ratio of 0.29, being small and containing no information, were "… of little use for guiding initial treatment decisions", especially in the critically ill with a high pre-test sepsis probability [22]. As diagnostic meta-analyses have had a history of poor reporting [23] compared with meta-analyses reporting treatment effects of randomized controlled trials, the attendant vigorous correspondence [22,[24][25][26][27][28][29] to some of the above meta-analyses is perhaps not surprising.One outstanding feature of these diagnostic meta-analyses was the variable cut-point procalcitonin thresholds used in the primary studies. Again in a response to the meta-analysis of Wacker et al. [14], Ruecker and Sch...