Clinical profile of malaria in children at a tertiary care hospital of Bihar and evaluation of parasite LDH based rapid diagnostic test for malaria

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Malaria is a very common infection leading to high morbidity and mortality. We aimed to evaluate the clinical profile of Malaria in Bihar.We also tried to evaluate the efficacy of pLDH based rapid diagnostic test for Malaria. Materials and Methods: This was a hospital-based retrospective observational evaluation of record of patients diagnosed with Malaria between August 2018 to August 2020 at Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Patna, Bihar. Statistical significance of different clinical features was evaluated between the prevalent malarial species. pLDH based RDT was evaluated against the microscopic examination of Plasmodium species. Fischer’s exact test was used to determine” p value”. Results: 92 patients had confirmed diagnosis of malaria during the study period. The number of males was more 52(56.5%) and most patients were from the age group 5-10 years (37%). Vomiting, respiratory symptoms and jaundice were found significantly higher (p< 0.05) in falciparum Malaria cases. Sensitivity, specificity, PPV and NPV of pLDH based RDT were 93.8%, 87.5%, 76.2%, and 97.1% respectively when compared to microscopy. The positive likelihood ratio was 7.5 and the negative likelihood ratio was 0.07 Conclusion: The present study showed the clinical profile of Malaria in the state of Bihar, India. We were able to show that P. vivax infection is more common and P.falciparuminfection more dangerous. Rapid diagnostic tests were found to be effectiveneed to look for evidence of Malaria in sick children even without typical signs and symptoms. Keywords: Malaria, RDT, Plasmodium, Thrombocytopenia.