IL18 and acute kidney injury: Subgroup analysis (Table 5) showed that urine IL-18 level in pediatric patients (<18 years) was more effective in predicting AKI, with a diagnostic OR of 7.510 (95 % CI 2.988–18.875) compared to 4.652 (2.710–7.987) for the adult group (p = 0.334); the early AKI predictive time (<12 h) subgroup displayed the highest diagnostic OR of 8.176 (95 % CI 2.191–30.507) among the three subgroups (<12, 24 and 48 h, p = 0.037).