Electrical Engineering Department (ESAT), KU Leuven, STADIUS, Leuven, Belgium.
Addis Ababa Institute of Technology, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
PLoS One. 2021 Feb 16;16(2):e0246519. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246519. eCollection 2021.
Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) remains one of the major causes of death and disability in developing countries. This preventable, treatable but not curable form of cardiovascular disease is needlessly killing scores of children and youth mainly due to the misunderstanding of the burden of the disease in these countries. We sought to describe the prevalence of RHD at one of the major referral cardiology clinics in Ethiopia.
This was a retrospective cross-sectional chart review of all patients referred for a cardiopathy at the Tikur Anbessa Referral Cardiac Clinic from June 2015 to August 2018. We excluded records of patients with a non-cardiac diagnosis and those without a clear diagnosis. A predesigned and tested EXCEL form was used to collect the data. The data was encoded directly from the patient record files. MATLAB's statistics toolbox (MATLAB2019b) was used for statistical analysis.
Among the total 7576 records analyzed 59.5% of the patients were women. 83.1% of the data belonged to adult patients with the largest concentration reported in the 18 to 27 age group. 69.7% of the patients were from urban areas. The median age of the study population was 30 (interquartile range = 21-50). 4151 cases were caused by RHD which showed that RHD constituted 54.8% of the cases. The median age for RHD patients was 25 (interquartile range = 19-34). The second most prevalent disease was hypertensive heart disease which constituted 13.6% that was followed by congenital heart disease with 9% prevalence rate.
The results of this study indicated the extent of the RHD prevalence in Ethiopia's cardiac hospital was 54.8%. What was more critical was that almost 70% of the RHD patients were mainly the working-age group(19 to 34 years).
风湿性心脏病（Rheumatic Heart Disease，简称 RHD）仍然是发展中国家主要的死亡和残疾原因之一。这种可预防、可治疗但无法治愈的心血管疾病，由于这些国家对疾病负担的误解，导致大量儿童和青年无辜死亡。我们旨在描述埃塞俄比亚一家主要转诊心脏病学诊所的 RHD 患病率。
这是一项回顾性横断面图表回顾研究，研究对象为 2015 年 6 月至 2018 年 8 月期间在提库安贝萨转诊心脏诊所因心脏病就诊的所有患者。我们排除了有非心脏诊断和无明确诊断记录的患者。使用预先设计和测试的 EXCEL 表格收集数据。数据直接从患者病历文件中编码。MATLAB 的统计工具箱（MATLAB2019b）用于统计分析。
在分析的 7576 份记录中，59.5%的患者为女性。83.1%的数据属于成年患者，其中最大的患者群体集中在 18 至 27 岁年龄组。69.7%的患者来自城市地区。研究人群的中位数年龄为 30 岁（四分位距 = 21-50）。4151 例由 RHD 引起，表明 RHD 占病例的 54.8%。RHD 患者的中位数年龄为 25 岁（四分位距 = 19-34）。第二大常见疾病是高血压性心脏病，占 13.6%，其次是先天性心脏病，患病率为 9%。
本研究结果表明，埃塞俄比亚心脏医院的 RHD 患病率为 54.8%。更关键的是，近 70%的 RHD 患者主要是劳动年龄组（19 至 34 岁）。
