Background: Respiratory diseases constitute an important proportion of the global health burden. This burden is expected to rise. There are few studies documenting the pattern of respiratory admissions across the West African sub-region. Available studies are mostly old;thus the probable changing pattern of respiratory diseases with changing time trend has not been adequately explored particularly with compounding effect of HIV and increasing environmental pollution. Objective: This study aimed at documenting the pattern of respiratory diseases admissions at FMC, Owo and to highlight the outcomes among the patients. Method: It was a retrospective study of the medical records of all the patients admitted into the medical wards of FMC, Owo between January, 2007 and December, 2012. We extracted data for 502 patients who were admitted with respiratory diagnoses. We summarized the data by frequency tables and figures. Result: Over half (54%) of the patients were males and out of this (i.e., the males), one third of them were in the 25-44 years age group. Less than 10% of the patients were 24 years and below, while one quarter of the patients were aged 65 years and above with over 60% of the elderly were also males. The top five respiratory diseases were tuberculosis (TB), pneumonias, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD), asthma and lung cancer (53%, 21.1%, 13.7%, 8.4% and 1.4% respectively). Among the people with tuberculosis, 33% were co-infected with HIV. Conclusion: Tuberculosis and other communicable diseases remain an important cause of respiratory admissions in our study. Although our study is hospital-based, it serves as a preliminary report upon which larger studies can build. There is need to optimize preventive measures for the reduction of communicable respiratory diseases and also improve the capacity for the detection of non-communicable ones like lung cancer that appears to be uncommon in our study.
Select your language of interest to view the total content in your interested language
Annals of Medical and Health Sciences Research received 20588 citations as per google scholar report
The Annals of Medical and Health Sciences Research is a bi-monthly multidisciplinary medical journal.