OpenLink Software

About: Twenty-eight patients with Japanese spotted fever were clinically investigated. The diagnosis was determined by confirming an increase of specific antibody. All patients were treated with minocycline, and all recovered, excluding one patient with a fulminant course. Fever and exanthema were observed in all patients, and an eschar was pointed out in 20 (71%) patients. The platelet count was 10 × 10(4)/μl or lower in 8 (28%) patients. The fibrin degradation product (FDP)-level was abnormally high, 10 μg/ml or more, in 16 (57%) patients. The creatine kinase (CK) value was high in 14 of 22 patients, suggesting the presence of myositis. The leukocyte count, FDP, C-reactive protein, and soluble interleukin 2 receptor (sIL2-R) levels were significantly higher in severe cases. In the group without concomitant steroid therapy, mean times of 54.7 h and 101.4 h were required to reduce the temperature to 38°C and 37°C or lower, respectively, after the initiation of tetracycline treatment. There were 6 severe cases: 1 with disseminated intravascular coagulation, 2 with multiorgan failure, 1 with acute respiratory distress syndrome, and 2 with meningoencephalitis. These severe cases formed a group that required 6 or more days to initiate therapy after the onset (P < 0.005 vs non-severe group), showing that delay in diagnosis and therapy is the major cause of aggravation. In the 2 patients complicated by multiorgan failure, the sIL2-R level, produced by activated lymphocytes, was 10 000 U/ml or higher, suggesting that an sIL2-R level of more than 10 000 U/ml can be used as a marker of poor prognosis. It may be better that moderate to severe cases are treated with minocycline plus short-term steroid therapy.

 Permalink

an Entity references as follows:

Faceted Search & Find service v1.13.91

Alternative Linked Data Documents: Sponger | ODE     Raw Data in: CXML | CSV | RDF ( N-Triples N3/Turtle JSON XML ) | OData ( Atom JSON ) | Microdata ( JSON HTML) | JSON-LD    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] This material is Open Knowledge Creative Commons License Valid XHTML + RDFa
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3229 as of Jul 10 2020, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Single-Server Edition (94 GB total memory)
Copyright © 2009-2025 OpenLink Software