Infection is a major complication and potentially life-threatening in patients with acute leukemia. The patients require prompt broad-spectrum antibictics therapy when fever develops. One of the keys to successful patient management is the
recognition
of institutional trends of the spectrum of infections and infecting microorganisms. So we evaluated 138 patients with acute leukemia and blastic crisis of chronic myelogenous leukemia admitted to Seoul National University Hospital from July 1986
to
June
1992.
@ES The results are following:
@EN 1) Total number of febrile episodes was 224 and 60% of them occurred after chemotherapy.
2) Microbiologically-defined infection, clinically defined infection, and unexplained fever accounted for 28%, 45%, 27% of the febrile episodes respectively.
3) Fifty-eight percent of microbiologically-defined infections were caused by gram-negative bacteria, and 36% were gram-positive bacteria. There was a tendency to a greater proportion of gram(+) organisms than that of the last study(p>o.1).
Escherichia
coli was the most common organism, and coagulase-negative staphylococci, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella were common in decreasing order.
4) Pneumonia was the most common type of infection, followed by skin and soft tissue infection, perianal infection, gingivitis and primary septicemia.
5) Seventy-two percent of total infections improved with therapy and this success are was higher than that of the last study (p<0.001).
|