Adolescents make-up 18% of the world’s population [1]. Adolescence and young adulthood coincide with major changes in health problems [2,3] and emergence of risk behaviors [4]. Yet extensive review of literature has revealed scarce data on the morbidity pattern of adolescent patients in India. Thus we conducted this study of demographic and morbidity profile of adolescents admitted in pediatric wards.

This prospective study was conducted in the inpatient general Pediatrics ward of Kalawati Saran Children’s Hospital, Lady Hardinge Medical College (LHMC) for a period of 17 months. All adolescents (10-18yrs) admitted for at least 48 hours were included in the study. Patients in ICU or shifted from the ICU, those with intellectual disability, and those who left against medical advice were excluded. A structured form was used containing demographic data like age, sex, educational status of the patient and their parents, family income, nutritional status, hemoglobin levels, immunisation status and diagnosis at discharge to assess the morbidity profile. For assessing anemia and nutritional status, respective age-matched WHO data were used [5, 6]

Of the total 32115 admissions, 2742 were adolescents (39.7% females). 68.8% were aged between 10 and 13 years (early adolescence), and 28.6% between 14 and 16 years (mid adolescence). Among females, 14.0% were uneducated, 38.8% received primary education and 47.2% received secondary education. Whereas among males, these rates were 10.9% 45.8% and 43.3%, respectively. Immunization status showed that only 6.0% of the patients were immunised for age, and 11.4% were not imunised. 56.0% of the patients were anemic, 37.3% were thin whereas 2.8% were overweight. System-wise distributions of the diseases (Table I) shows the bulk of diseases as infectious. Dengue and dengue-like illness were the commonest diagnosis.

TABLE I Disease Spectrum of Adolescents (N=2742)

In this study, a higher proportion of male admissions (60.2 %) were noted probably due to social reasons. 56% of the patients were found to be anaemic which is considerably higher than previous figure [7,8], probably a Berkesonian bias. 37.3% of the patients were found to be undernourished, at par with most other studies [7,8]. Systemic infections was the commonest cause of admission (33.6%) in contrast to Sachdeva, et al.[9], where the commonest cause of admission was injury, poisonings, burns and accidents followed by pregnancy (13.9%), but consistent with findings of Ojukwu, et al. [10]. This difference is probably related to the sources of data (only pediatrics ward in our study as compared to different wards in the study by Sachdeva, et al. Overall hospital morbidity in this study, like others from developing countries, is infectious in origin, which is in sharp contrast to with the developed countries with non-infectious causes including substance abuse, depression, obesity forming the bulk [4]. Being a hospital-based data our findings cannot be extrapolated to the general population, but in absence of any baseline data it can be close approximation to the overall morbidity pattern.

Contributors: AC: Data acquisition, data analysis, design of the study, revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content and final approval; SB: Design of the study, analysis, drafting and final approval of the manuscript; BR: analysis of data, data acquisition, drafting of the manuscript and final approval.

Funding; None; Competing interests: None stated.

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