Journal article
Incidence, causes and phenotypes of acute seizures in Kenyan children post the malaria-decline period
- Abstract:
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Background: Acute seizures are a common cause of paediatric admissions to hospitals in Africa, and malaria is an important cause of seizures in endemic areas. Malaria has declined in the past decade whilst neonatal admissions have increased, both which may affect the incidence and phenotypes of acute seizures in African children.
Methods: We examined the effect of recent decline in malaria and the increasing burden of neonatal admissions on the incidence, causes and phenotypes of acute seizures admitted to hospital from 2009–2013. We used logistic regression to measure associations and Poisson regression to calculate the incidence and rate ratios.
Results: The overall incidence of acute seizures over the 5-year period was 312 per 100,000/year (95 % CI, 295–329): 116 per 100,000/year (95 % CI, 106–127) for complex seizures and 443 per 100,000 live births (95 % CI, 383–512) for neonatal seizures. Over the period, there was an increase in incidence of seizures-attributable to malaria (SAM) (incidence rate ratio (IRR) = 1.25; p < 0.001), but neither non-SAM (IRR = 1.03; p = 0.569) nor neonatal seizures (IRR = 0.99; p = 0.905). Important causes of acute seizures were malaria (33 %) and respiratory tract infections (19 %); and for neonatal seizures were neonatal sepsis (51 %), hypoglycemia (41 %) and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (21 %). Mortality occurred in 6 % of all acute seizures, being more common in complex seizures (8 %) and neonatal seizures (10 %) than other seizures (p < 0.001 for both comparisons).
Conclusions: Acute seizures remain common in children despite a decline in the incidence of malaria; suggesting that causes for these seizures need to be prevented in the community.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 740.7KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12883-015-0444-8
Authors
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/029chgv08
- Grant:
- 092654/Z/10/A
- 083744/B/07/C
- 099782/Z/12/Z
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- BMC Neurology More from this journal
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 180
- Publication date:
- 2015-10-06
- Acceptance date:
- 2015-09-29
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1471-2377
- Pmid:
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26444670
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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575278
- Local pid:
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pubs:575278
- Deposit date:
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2024-11-23
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Serem et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2015
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2015, Serem et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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