Clinical predictors of dengue fever co-infected with leptospirosis among patients admitted for dengue fever - A pilot study

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. © 2017 the author(s).