Abstract
Dengue is mostly considered an acute illness with three phases: febrile, critical with possible hemorrhagic manifestations, and recovery. But some patients present persistent symptoms, including fatigue and depression, as acknowledged by the World Health Organization. If persistent symptoms affect a non-negligible share of patients, the burden of dengue will be underestimated. On the basis of a systematic literature review and econometric modeling, we found a significant relationship between the share of patients reporting persisting symptoms and time. We updated estimates of the economic burden of dengue in Mexico, addressing uncertainty in productivity loss and incremental expenses using Monte Carlo simulations. Persistent symptoms represent annually about US$22.6 (95% certainty level [CL]: US$13–US$29) million in incremental costs and 28.2 (95% CL: 21.6–36.2) additional disability-adjusted life years per million population, or 13% and 43% increases over previous estimates, respectively. Although our estimates have uncertainty from limited data, they show a substantial, unmeasured burden. Similar patterns likely extend to other dengue-endemic countries.
Highlights
Dengue incidence and its geographical range have expanded substantially in the past decades; it has become a major public health challenge to most tropical and subtropical countries worldwide.[1]
Some dengue patients present persistent symptoms including fatigue, depression, and weight loss after the recovery phase, a possibility acknowledged by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 1997.6
A Malaysian study[4] found that the adverse effects of symptomatic dengue virus (DENV) infection on patients’ quality of life (QoL) extend well beyond the febrile phase, by day 14 of illness most patients in the sample had returned to a QoL of at least 90%
Summary
Dengue incidence and its geographical range have expanded substantially in the past decades; it has become a major public health challenge to most tropical and subtropical countries worldwide.[1]. We used the predicted values of persistent symptoms of dengue to extend recent estimates of the burden of dengue in Mexico, using the previously reported economic and disease burden parameters for acute dengue episodes.[10] To address uncertainty in our estimates, we used a probabilistic sensitivity analysis.
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