scholarly journals Atypical presentation of COVID-19 in a frail older person

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-524 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui Sian Tay ◽  
Rowan Harwood

Abstract Common symptoms of pandemic coronavirus disease (COVID-19) include fever and cough. We describe a 94-year-old man with well-controlled schizoaffective disorder, who presented with non-specific and atypical symptoms: delirium, low-grade pyrexia and abdominal pain. He was given antibiotics for infection of unknown source, subsequently refined to treatment for community-acquired pneumonia. Despite active treatment, he deteriorated with oxygen desaturation and tachypnoea. A repeat chest X-ray showed widespread opacification. A postmortem throat swab identified COVID-19 infection. He was treated in three wards over 5 days with no infection control precautions. This has implications for the screening, assessment and isolation of frail older people to COVID-specific clinical facilities and highlights the potential for spread among healthcare professionals and other patients.

2005 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
C.M. Sanguinetti ◽  
F. De Benedetto ◽  
C.F. Donner

Background. Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) is still a significant problem in terms of incidence, mortality rate, particularly in infants and the elderly, and socioeconomic burden. General Practitioners (GPs) are the first reference for patients with this disease, but there are few published studies regarding the outpatient treatment of CAP. Methods. The ISOCAP study aimed to identify the type and outcome of the diagnostic-therapeutic management of CAP by GPs in Italy, within the framework of developing a closer interrelationship between GPs and pulmonary specialists. Thirty-six Pulmonary Divisions throughout Italy each contacted 5 local GPs who agreed to recruit the first 5 consecutive patients who consulted them for suspected CAP within the study’s 1-year observation period. Results. A total of 183 GPs took part in the study and enrolled, by the end of the observation period, 763 CAP patients; of these, complete data was available for 737 patients [males=373, females=364, mean age (±SD) 58.8±19.6 years]. 64.4% of patients had concomitant diseases, mainly systemic arterial hypertension and COPD. Diagnosis of CAP was based by GPs on physical examination only in 41.6% of cases; in the remaining chest X-ray was also performed. In only 4.6% of patients were samples sent for microbiological analysis. All patients were treated with antibiotics: 76.7% in mono-therapy, 23.3% with a combination of antibiotics. The antibiotic class most prevalently used in mono-therapy was cephalosporin, primarily ceftriaxone; the most frequently used combinations were cephalosporin+macrolide and cephalosporin+quinolone. Mono-therapy was effective in 70% of cases, the combination of two or more antibiotics in 91.2% of patients. Overall treatment efficacy was 94.7%; hospitalisation was required in 8.5% of cases. Conclusions. Outpatient management of CAP by GPs in Italy is effective, hospitalisation being necessary only in the most severe cases due to age, co-morbidities or extent of pneumonia. This signifies a very significant savings in national health costs.


Author(s):  
Rivo Lova Herilanto Rakotomalala ◽  
Harimino Mireille Rakotondravelo ◽  
Andrianina Harivelo Ranivoson ◽  
Annick Lalaina Robinson

Background: The etiological diagnosis of pneumonia is often difficult because of the impossibility of microbiological confirmation most of the time. Therefore, chest X-ray is still essential for a positive diagnosis and etiological orientation. The main objective of our study was to describe the radiographic aspects of acute community-acquired pneumonia and tubercular pneumonia in children.Methods: This was a descriptive retrospective study conducted at the university hospital mother and child of Tsaralalana from January 1st to July 31st, 2017.Results: Sixty-nine cases of pneumonia were included, including 13 cases of TB pneumonia and 46 cases of acute community-acquired pneumonia. The average age was 36.68 months with a male predominance. Clinically, respiratory functional signs predominated in both cases. Alteration in general condition was mainly observed in tubercular pneumonia (26.08%). Alveolar syndromes were present in 43.47% of TB pneumonias and 36.94% of acute community-acquired pneumonia. With regard to the radiographic images, alveolar involvement was common to both types of pneumonia; the nodular image was present in 8.69% of the tubercular pneumonias and 2.17% of the acute community-acquired pneumonia; the cavity image was present only in the tubercular pneumonia (p=0.04); the right-sided location predominated in both cases.Conclusions: X-ray images were common to both TB pneumonia and acute community-acquired pneumonia; some images were specific to TB pneumonia. However, the etiologic orientation of pneumonia is based on a combination of epidemiologic, clinical, and radiographic evidence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. e226805
Author(s):  
Anoopkishore Chidambaram ◽  
Sirisha Donekal

Spontaneous subcutaneous emphysema and pneumomediastinum in children without any predisposing factors is a rare entity. We present a case of an adolescent boy with spontaneous pneumomediastinum. He is a 14-year-old boy brought to the hospital with an odd feeling in the neck and chest. Initial chest X-ray revealed subcutaneous emphysema and pneumomediastinum. He was further evaluated with CT thorax and abdomen with contrast which revealed extensive pneumomediastinum with associated surgical emphysema in the chest wall and neck. Expert opinions from the cardiothoracic and respiratory teams were obtained. The child was discharged with safety netting and description of red flag signs. Repeat chest X-ray in 2 weeks showed complete resolution of the pneumomediastinum and subcutaneous emphysema. We will briefly discuss about the diagnosis and treatment of spontaneous pneumomediastinum and subcutaneous emphysema.


2017 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. S15
Author(s):  
Mazen Elfaki ◽  
Martina Paetzel ◽  
John Nugent

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 540-546
Author(s):  
Diana Carolina Moncada ◽  
Zulma Vanessa Rueda ◽  
Antonio Macías ◽  
Tatiana Suárez ◽  
Héctor Ortega ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (15) ◽  
pp. 2457-2461
Author(s):  
Youssef Ibrahim Haggag ◽  
Karim Mashhour ◽  
Kamal Ahmed ◽  
Nael Samir ◽  
Waheed Radwan

BACKGROUND: Lung ultrasound (US) is an available and inexpensive tool for the diagnosis of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP); it which has no hazards of radiation and can be easily used. AIM: To evaluate the efficacy of lung ultrasound in the diagnosis and follow-up of CAP. PATIENTS AND METHODS: 100 patients aged from 40 to 63 years with a mean age of 52.3 ± 10 years admitted to the Critical Care Department, Cairo University with pictures of CAP. Lung US was performed for all patients initially, then a plain chest X-ray (CXR) was performed. Another lung ultrasound was performed on the 10th day after admission. RESULTS: Initial chest X-ray was correlated with the initial chest ultrasound examination in CAP diagnosis (R-value = 0.629, P < 0.001). Cohen's κ was run to determine if there is an agreement between the findings of the initial chest X-ray findings and those of the initial chest ultrasound in CAP diagnosis. A moderate agreement was found where κ = .567 (95% CI, 0.422 to 0.712) and P < 0.001. Upon initial examination, the CXR diagnosed CAP in 48.0% of patients, while lung US diagnosed the disease in 70% of patients. Moreover, lung US was more sensitive than CXR (P-value < 0.001). Compared to the accuracy of computed tomography (CT) chest (100%) which is the gold standard for CAP diagnosis, the accuracy of lung US was 95.0%, while the accuracy of CXR was 81.0%. CONCLUSION: This study proved the effectiveness of lung ultrasound in CAP diagnosis.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Md. Saikat Islam Khan ◽  
Anichur Rahman ◽  
Md. Razaul Karim ◽  
Nasima Islam Bithi ◽  
Shahab Band ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 pandemic is an emerging respiratory infectious disease, having a significant impact on the health and life of many people around the world. Therefore, early identification of COVID-19 patients is the fastest way to restrain the spread of the pandemic. However, as the number of cases grows at an alarming pace, most developing countries are now facing a shortage of medical resources and testing kits. Besides, using testing kits to detect COVID-19 cases is a time-consuming, expensive, and cumbersome procedure. Faced with these obstacles, most physicians, researchers, and engineers have advocated for the advancement of computer-aided deep learning models to assist healthcare professionals in quickly and inexpensively recognize COVID-19 cases from chest X-ray (CXR) images. With this motivation, this paper proposes a CovidMulti-Net architecture based on the transfer learning concept to classify COVID-19 cases from normal and other pneumonia cases using three publicly available datasets that include 1341, 1341, and 446 CXR images from healthy samples and 902, 1564, and 1193 CXR images infected with Viral Pneumonia, Bacterial Pneumonia, and COVID-19 diseases. In the proposed framework, features from CXR images are extracted using three well-known pre-trained models, including DenseNet-169, ResNet-50, and VGG-19. The extracted features are then fed into a concatenate layer, making a robust hybrid model. The proposed framework achieved a classification accuracy of 99.4%, 95.2%, and 94.8% for 2-Class, 3-Class, and 4-Class datasets, exceeding all the other state-of-the-art models. These results suggest that the CovidMulti-Net frameworks ability to discriminate individuals with COVID-19 infection from healthy ones and provides the opportunity to be used as a diagnostic model in clinics and hospitals. We also made all the materials publicly accessible for the research community at: https://github.com/saikat15010/CovidMulti-Net-Architecture.git.


Author(s):  
Veronika Dudnyk ◽  
Nataliya Sinchuk ◽  
Kateryna Khromykh

Community-acquired pneumonia is one of the most common infections in children with an annual incidence of 34 to 40 cases per 1000 children in Europe and North America. Pneumonia is a common cause of death in children under five years of age worldwide. Thus, about 1,8 million children die from pneumonia annually. According to the statistics of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, about 80,000 children every year suffer from community-acquired pneumonia in Ukraine. Material and methods: Retrospective analysis of 100 case histories of children aged 3-9 years old with outpatient segmental/polisegmental pneumonia who were in inpatient treatment in the pulmonology department of regional hospital from January 2017 to December 2018. The representativeness of the comparison groups is represented by age and sex. Methods of examination: clinical-anamnestic, laboratory and instrumental (pulse oximetry, chest X-ray). Results: Most of the children (58%) were admitted to the hospital on the first day of the illness. In 33% of children, comorbidity was noted. All children had fever, an unproductive cough, while symptoms of intoxication (76 ± 4.27%) and dyspnea (52 ± 4.49%) were more pronounced in children 3-6 years old. In the general analysis of blood in children of the first age group, in most cases, leukocytosis was more than 12 G / L (56 ± 4.96%), neutrophilic shift of the leukocyte formula to the left of 88 ± 3.25% and elevated ESR (84 ± 3.66%). X-ray in children of the first age group was dominated by polysegmental pneumonia at 54 ± 4.44%, while in children of the second age group segmental pneumonia was more common (64 ± 4.66%). Half of the children of both age groups prescribed antibiotics of the first line - a group of penicillins and cephalosporins. When starting antibiotic therapy with penicillins, the symptoms of pneumonia decreased already in the 2nd day in 16% ± 3.67% in the group of children 3-6 years old and in 18% ± 3.84% of children 7-9 years. Conclusion. Pneumonia is one of the most common diseases in children, and one of those that can cause many complications and even death. Accordingly, the treatment of this disease should be maximally effective and short-lived. The best choice for treating pneumonia is a group of oral aminopenicillins, which were administered in the first days of the disease and showed significantly better results than patients treated with cephalosporins.


Author(s):  
Silvia Bloise ◽  
Domenico P La Regina ◽  
Elio Iovine ◽  
Cristina Latini ◽  
Ambra Nicolai ◽  
...  

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