Factors Affecting Time to Death From Start of Treatment Among Children Succumbing to Bacterial Meningitis

Abstract

Many risks of death in childhood bacterial meningitis are well-identified, but factors influencing survival time have received less attention. Better understanding of this issue could help explain why adjuvant medications have performed unevenly in different trials. In a post hoc analysis of prospectively collected data from a large bacterial meningitis treatment trial in Luanda, Angola, we compared time to death after initiation of antimicrobial treatment among 206 children with etiology and other patient characteristics. The risks of dying very quickly (0-4 hours), quickly (4-8 hours) or after longer periods were analyzed by logistic regression. Median time to death was 18.5 hours, half the time in Streptococcus pneumoniae (11.8 hours) compared with Haemophilus influenzae (26.8 hours) meningitis. Of all deaths caused by pneumococcal or H.influenzae meningitis, 42% versus 16%, respectively, occurred within the first 8 hours. In addition, patients who succumbed within 8 hours, unlike those dying later, had a short disease history, shock, hypoglycemia and poor cerebrospinal fluid white cell response. Time to death in Angola is so short that hardly anything, except perhaps modern intensive care, is likely to improve outcome in a patient with meningitis, especially the pneumococcal disease.