With regard to ARDS and pneumonia, neither comparison of medians nor logistic regression analyses, or ROC statistics provided a statistically significant result for the initial and day-2 levels of sRAGE, SP-D and KL-6/MUC1, thus concordantly indicating that these three biomarkers were inappropriate to identify patients at high risk for pulmonary complications and therefore not included in the further discussion. The gene discussed is MUC1; the disease is pneumonia.