Study of Dengue Fever in an Epidemic - A Single Centre Observational Study at Tertiary Care Hospital

Introduction: Dengue fever (DF) is one of the most common and the most important vector-borne diseases caused by arboviruses with a significant mortality and morbidity. The incidence of DF is increasing over the years. This study aims to map the clinical features of the disease. Materials and Methods: This prospective, observational study was done among adult patients at a tertiary care medical college hospital. Two thousand three hundred and fourteen patients were studied and analyzed. All patients who were nonstructural protein 1 (NS1) antigen/IgM dengue positive were included in the study. Clinical features, hematological, and biochemical parameters were noted. Results: In the 2314 patients studied, body pain was the major symptom (35.4%) followed by headache (33.5%), fever (24.5%), nausea (16.9%), rash (16.6%), eye pain (16.2%), vomiting (12.1%), joint pain (10.2%), diarrhea (6.1%), anorexia (4.7%), cough (3.7%), lethargy (2.2%), and sore throat (1.2%). Hemorrhagic manifestations were noted in 263 patients (11.36%), of which the most common was epistaxis (50.1%) followed by purpura/ecchymosis (8.7%), hematemesis (6.8%), bleeding gums (6.8%), blood in stool (6.4%), hematuria (2.6%), and vaginal bleeding (0.4%). Patients positive for dengue NS1 were 1709 (73.9%), dengue IgM were 154 (6.66%), and both dengue NS1 and IgM were 743 (32.1%) patients. The mortality rate was 0.8%. Of 2314 patients, 29.52% had severe thrombocytopenia (<20,000/mm 3 ), 17.7% had moderate thrombocytopenia (20,000–50,000/mm 3 ), and 72.66% had mild thrombocytopenia (50,000–100,000/mm 3 ). Conclusion: A clinician should be alerted to the possibility of dengue infection if a patient has a fever accompanied by headache, retroorbital pain, an erythematous morbilliform rash, conjunctival suffusion, and itching in the palms and soles, as well as thrombocytopenia, leucopenia, and elevated liver transaminases.