Abstract

SAMANIEGO, Pierina; RAMIREZ, Leticia; JIMENEZ, Jimmy  and  MARTINEZ DE CUELLAR, Celia. Characterization of dengue in the inpatient area of the Pediatric Service of the Hospital de Clínicas. Rev. Inst. Med. Trop. [online]. 2022, vol.17, n.1, pp.5-12. ISSN 1996-3696.  https://doi.org/10.18004/imt/2022.17.1.2.

Dengue is an endemic disease in several countries in Africa, Asia and South America, especially in the Southern Cone area. Although it generally affects mostly adults, in our country the epidemic did not stop affecting children. The objective of the present study was to describe clinical-epidemiological characteristics of pediatric patients hospitalized for dengue in the Department of Pediatrics, in the period between October 2019 and March 2020.

An observational, descriptive, cross-sectional study with an analytical component was carried out, in which patients aged 0 to 17 years with a probable or confirmed diagnosis of dengue were included. The sample was recruited in a non-probabilistic manner for convenience based on the total number of patients who met the inclusion criteria. The data were obtained from the medical records of the patients who met the inclusion criteria and entered into a database of the Microsoft Office 2007 Excel ® program and transferred to the statistical package Stata v14.

A total of 109 patients were included, 60 (55%) were female and 49 (45%) male with a mean age of 9 years. The most frequent symptom was fever 105 (98.1%), followed by headache 35 (33%), nausea and vomiting 33 (31.1%) and myalgia 25 (23.6%). 46.29% (50/109) presented warning signs; abdominal pain being the most frequent sign and 66.7% (72/109) were cases of severe dengue. At the time of hospitalization, the patients were on their 3.5th day of illness and remained hospitalized for an average of 3.98 days. During hospitalization, 33 (31.3%) patients required expansions. Regarding the laboratory findings, the hematocrit at admission was 40.3±7, leukocytes were on average 5,573±3,862 and platelets 187,054±100,649. Platetopenia ≤100,000 was significantly more frequent in patients with warning signs (p: 0.02 OR: 3.73 CI: 1.02 - 13.88). Lethargy was significantly more frequent in patients with comorbidities (p: 0.02. OR: 5.64 CI: 1.05 - 44.02). Most of the patients had a good evolution and were discharged and only one (0.91%) died.

The cases of dengue in hospitalized patients were more frequent in the group of adolescents and in the female sex. Most were from group B2, the most frequent symptom being fever and among the alarm signs the most frequent was abdominal pain. Most of the patients attended the clinic on day 4 of the onset of symptoms and the average duration of hospitalization was close to 3 days, with a case fatality rate of 0.9%.

Keywords : Dengue; Disease; Epidemics; Abdominal Pain; Fever.

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