Background:Scrub typhus is a febrile zoonosis resulting from infection with Orientia tsutsugamushi. Attentions for tsutsugamushi disease are growing about its ecologic, epidemiologic and clinical characteristics according to increasing patients and these studies were helpful to understand the pathophysiology and many clinical features of tsutsugamushi disease. Although scrub typhus has been treated successfully with the introduction of effective antibiotics, life-threatening serious complications including gastrointestinal bleeding were still remained. The authors here intended to describe different endoscopic characteristics of the gastrointestinal manifestation of tsutsugamushi disease, and then to evaluate the clinical significance of upper gastrointestinal endoscopic feature and clinical severity index (CSI) as the predictable factors for clinical severity of tsutsugamushi disease.
Methods:One hundred and forty two patients who were diagnosed as tsutsugamushi disease at Masan-Samsung Hospital from January 2001 to December 2002 were enrolled. Patients were recommended to be taken upper gastrointestinal endoscopy irrespective of abdominal symptoms and 40 patients were classified into 5 degrees by endoscopic findings. All patients were classified by CSI based on clinical symptoms and laboratory findings. Correlations among CSI, hospital stay, and endoscopic grade were analyzed.
Results:The older patients (p=0.0018) and the patients with lower serum hemoglobin (p=0.0049), lower serum albumin (p<0.0001), higher serum bilirubin (p=0.0109), higher BUN (p<0.0001) and creatinine (p=0.0223), and longer activated prothrombin time (p=0.0193) had significantly longer hospital stay. The patients with longer hospital stay had significantly severe esophagogastroduodenoscopic (EGD) findings (p=0.0017). Patients with higher CSI score had significantly longer hospital stay (p=0.0069) and more severe EGD finding (p=0.0062).
Conclusions:There were significant correlations between CSI, hospital stay, and EGD grade in this study. CSI and endoscopic feature may be useful as the predictable factors for clinical severity in tsutsugamushi disease.
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