Abstract

VARONA RODRIGUEZ, Francisco; GARCIA SANCHEZ, José; PEREZ CRUZ, Beatriz  and  AVILES ALVAREZ, Adela. Presumptive etiologic diagnosis of acute meningoencephalitis in children from 1 to 4 years old. AMC [online]. 2002, vol.6, n.6, pp. 623-631. ISSN 1025-0255.

324 children aged 1 to 14 years seen in 1999 in the service studied Provincial Emergency Eduardo Agramonte Piña Pediatric Hospital, to determine the clinical and laboratory elements on which based presumptive etiologic diagnosis of meningoencephalitis acute. It was found that age, the time between the onset of symptoms and health care, as well as the general state and not allow discrimination precisely if it is a viral or bacterial etiology. The laboratory elements described as typical of meningitis bacterial appear in a small number of patients, in which the predominance of leukocytes in blood and cerebrospinal fluid was main parameter to be taken into account to define the suspected cause of process. Gram stain showed the presence of germs in just a 17, 9%, and spinal fluid cultivation confirmed the initial diagnosis 66, 1% of patients, which showed an overdiagnosis of bacterial cause in our midst.

Keywords : MENINGOENCEFALITIS [diagnóstico]; MENINGOENCEFALITIS [etiología]; NIÑO.

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