Journal article
Malaria hospitalisation in East Africa: age, phenotype and transmission intensity
- Abstract:
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Background
Understanding the age patterns of disease is necessary to target interventions to maximise cost-effective impact. New malaria chemoprevention and vaccine initiatives target young children attending routine immunisation services. Here we explore the relationships between age and severity of malaria hospitalisation versus malaria transmission intensity.
Methods
Clinical data from 21 surveillance hospitals in East Africa were reviewed. Malaria admissions aged 1 month to 14 years from discrete administrative areas since 2006 were identified. Each site-time period was matched to a model estimated community-based age-corrected parasite prevalence to provide predictions of prevalence in childhood (PfPR2–10). Admission with all-cause malaria, severe malaria anaemia (SMA), respiratory distress (RD) and cerebral malaria (CM) were analysed as means and predicted probabilities from Bayesian generalised mixed models.
Results
52,684 malaria admissions aged 1 month to 14 years were described at 21 hospitals from 49 site-time locations where PfPR2–10 varied from < 1 to 48.7%. Twelve site-time periods were described as low transmission (PfPR2–10 < 5%), five low-moderate transmission (PfPR2–10 5–9%), 20 moderate transmission (PfPR2–10 10–29%) and 12 high transmission (PfPR2–10 ≥ 30%). The majority of malaria admissions were below 5 years of age (69–85%) and rare among children aged 10–14 years (0.7–5.4%) across all transmission settings. The mean age of all-cause malaria hospitalisation was 49.5 months (95% CI 45.1, 55.4) under low transmission compared with 34.1 months (95% CI 30.4, 38.3) at high transmission, with similar trends for each severe malaria phenotype. CM presented among older children at a mean of 48.7 months compared with 39.0 months and 33.7 months for SMA and RD, respectively. In moderate and high transmission settings, 34% and 42% of the children were aged between 2 and 23 months and so within the age range targeted by chemoprevention or vaccines.
Conclusions
Targeting chemoprevention or vaccination programmes to areas where community-based parasite prevalence is ≥10% is likely to match the age ranges covered by interventions (e.g. intermittent presumptive treatment in infancy to children aged 2–23 months and current vaccine age eligibility and duration of efficacy) and the age ranges of highest disease burden.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 1.3MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12916-021-02224-w
Authors
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- BMC Medicine More from this journal
- Volume:
- 20
- Article number:
- 28
- Place of publication:
- England
- Publication date:
- 2022-01-27
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-12-21
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1741-7015
- Pmid:
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35081974
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1235750
- Local pid:
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pubs:1235750
- Deposit date:
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2022-04-27
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Kamau et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- ©2022 The Authors. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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