Epidemiological features of some acute inflammatory morbid conditions in the neonatal period

In this study, medical records of 231 Prague, Czechoslovakia and 234 Moscow, USSR newborn infants treated for various forms of acute inflammatory diseases acquired in the neonatal period, i.e. during both hospital stay and home nursing period, were reviewed with the aim of assessing the epidemiological characteristics of these morbid conditions. As shown by the analysis of available epidemiological data, most of these inflammatory disease, both in Prague and Moscow, occurred shortly after birth, with a peak at 7 postnatal day, which pointed to hospital stay as a decisive factor in the onset of neonatal inflammation. In Prague, the overall number of inflammation cases diagnosed within the first decade of postnatal days was about three time the number recorded during the second decade; the respective figures for Moscow infants were in both decades identical. Assessed by clinical forms of inflammation, both groups of newborn infants showed concordance for conjunctivitis only (28%), frequencies of other clinical forms varied. In Moscow, the most common form of inflammation, predominant over all other clinical forms especially in the second decade, was pyoderma (29%), followed by conjunctivitis (28%), phlegmon (13%) and gastroenteritis (13%). Cases of gastroenteritis, acquired mostly during the home nursing period, were hospital-unrelated and predominated in the last decade of neonatal life. In the Prague group of infants, cases of catarrhal omphalitis were predominant, accounting for 37% of all diseases; this was due to a local outbreak of epidemic at the time of observation. The frequency of pyoderma, phlegmon and gastroenteritis was here lower than that among the Moscow infants, situation with the inflammation cases classed as "other diseases" was opposite.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)