FREQUENCY OF THROMBOCYTOPENIA IN CHILDREN SUFFERING FROM MALARIA

ABSTRACT
Introduction: Fever is one of the oldest known patient’s complaints written in literature. A large number of our OPD
patients come with complaint of fever. Malaria is one of major causes of fever without focus. It is endemic in Pakistan.
More than 80% of our population is at risk for getting malaria. Most of the cases of malaria are diagnosed and treated on
the bases of clinical judgement. There are a multiple hematologic derangements, like anaemia and thrombocytopenia,
which are commonly associated with malaria. Most of the tests used to support our diagnosis are operator dependant.
Therefore it is always desirable to have a mean which support our suspicion of malaria and that is not operator dependant.
Material and Methods: This was just an observational study which was done on malria patients presenting to the OPD
and emergency department of Naseer Teaching Hospital, from 1st April 2015 to 29th October 2015.
Results: A total of 100 cases were enrolled for the study, after fulfilling the inclusion exclusion criterion. Out of which
58 were male and 42 were female. Mean age of the patient was 6.93±3.86, mean haemoglobin was 9.52±2.21, and
mean platelets count was 1.02×103/micoliter±74232.69.
Conclusion: We did this study on a limited no of patient. Therefore we strongly request more such studies on large
scale to establish the role of thrombocytopenia as an indicator of malaria. Moreover we strongly negate the thinking
to consider it as an alternative to the more specific diagnostic modalities like thick and thin smear. We simply found
that thrombocytopenia is significantly associated with malaria, and we recommend to consider it for further research.
Keywords: Fever, Literature, Malaria, Thrombocytopenia, Anaemia, Population.