Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Medical Microbiology and Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 3 Microbiology Unit, Department of Pathology, Hospital Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 4 Department of Medical Microbiology and Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia. cheehy@upm.edu.my
J Biomed Sci, 2017 Jun 28;24(1):40.
PMID: 28659189 DOI: 10.1186/s12929-017-0344-x

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Dengue and leptospirosis infections are currently two major endemics in Malaysia. Owing to the overlapping clinical symptoms between both the diseases, frequent misdiagnosis and confusion of treatment occurs. As a solution, the present work initiated a pilot study to investigate the incidence related to co-infection of leptospirosis among dengue patients. This enables the identification of more parameters to predict the occurrence of co-infection.

METHOD: Two hundred sixty eight serum specimens collected from patients that were diagnosed for dengue fever were confirmed for dengue virus serotyping by real-time polymerase chain reaction. Clinical, laboratory and demographic data were extracted from the hospital database to identify patients with confirmed leptospirosis infection among the dengue patients. Thus, frequency of co-infection was calculated and association of the dataset with dengue-leptospirosis co-infection was statistically determined.

RESULTS: The frequency of dengue co-infection with leptospirosis was 4.1%. Male has higher preponderance of developing the co-infection and end result of shock as clinical symptom is more likely present among co-infected cases. It is also noteworthy that, DENV 1 is the common dengue serotype among all cases identified as dengue-leptospirosis co-infection in this study.

CONCLUSION: The increasing incidence of leptospirosis among dengue infected patients has posed the need to precisely identify the presence of co-infection for the betterment of treatment without mistakenly ruling out either one of them. Thus, anticipating the possible clinical symptoms and laboratory results of dengue-leptospirosis co-infection is essential.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.