RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF PREDICTOR OF RECURRENT RESPIRATORY INFECTIONS IN PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

Abstract

Among the current trends in the systemic prevention of recurrent respiratory infections in preschool children is the differentiated detection and clustering of the most significant ante- and prenatal factors associated with frequent acute respiratory infections. Thus, a comprehensive retrospective investigation of such factors in terms of their association with the integral indicators of acute respiratory infections recurrence in preschool children is exceptionally relevant. The study of particular manifestations of undifferentiated connective tissue dysplasia during recurrent respiratory infections is of great clinical and social relevance. This study research aims at determining the levels of inter-dependency between recurrence indicators of acute respiratory infections in preschool children and ante- and prenatal predictors analyzed retrospectively. Fifty-one children (24 boys and 27 girls) aged 1 to 6 years old, undergoing inpatient treatment for acute respiratory infection, were involved in the clinical study. Two markers of acute respiratory infection recurrence (infection index, resistance index) and dolichostenomelia integral indicator, which is used as the marker of external signs of connective tissue undifferentiated dysplasia, were calculated for each child. In addition, the retrospective analysis of 67 ante- and prenatal factors directly related to the children were examined. The statistical processing of the obtained digital material was performed by IBM SPSS Statistics 26 licensed software. Only non-parametric statistics methods were applied in the purpose.
 The first stage of investigating the inter-dependency between the acute respiratory infections frequency, the particular manifestations of undifferentiated connective tissue dysplasia, on the one hand, and the ante- and prenatal predictors, on the other hand, was carried out. The results obtained provided the grounds for the further research in the outlined direction involving the higher number of patients and using the more sensitive statistical methods. The higher infectious index values in the preschool children correlate with the following factors as lower initial overall age of their parents, smaller number of their mothers’ previous pregnancies, larger mothers’ body weight at the beginning of pregnancies, longer deliveries, lower Apgar scores in the newborns and no vaccination for tuberculosis. The resistance index values in the examined children increase with the simultaneous decreasing in the haemoglobin concentration in the mothers’ blood just before the deliveries and in cases of no vaccination in newborns for tuberculosis. The dolichostenomelia integral indicator in the patients aged from 1 to 6 years directly correlates with their age as well as with such retrospectively studied predictors as the newborns body mass index, the presence of foetoplacental insufficiency and the total number of complications caused by connective tissue dysplasia in their mothers during the pregnancies and deliveries.