International Journal of Medical Laboratory

Background and Aims: Since the epidemiological, clinical and experimental characteristics of meningitis are different for various locations, this study was conducted to investigate the characteristics of meningitis patients admitted to hospitals of Yazd in the 2009 to 2013.

Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional and descriptive study, all 261 patients with meningitis were considered in Yazd hospitals in the years 2009 to 2013. The type of sampling method was census. The data were collected from patients’ files using special forms that were designed for this purpose.

Results: In this study, 158 men (60.5%) and 103 women (39.5%) were considered. Among the patients, 53 people (20.30%) were under one-year-old, 63 people (24.14%) were between one to seven-year-old, and 85 people (32.57%) were adult. Among 261 patients, 126 ones (48.28%) and 135 ones (51.72%) were hospitalized with a diagnosis of non-bacterial meningitis and bacterial meningitis respectively. Generally, the cultivations of just 4 people (1.5%) were positive. The percentage of neutrophils and lymphocytes, the amount of glucose and the protein of cerebrospinal fluid in bacterial and aseptic meningitis was significantly different (p<0.001), but the total number of white blood cells, red blood cells and lactate dehydrogenase levels were not significantly different between the two groups.

Conclusions: Since there is no significant difference between epidemiological characteristics and clinical symptoms in bacterial and no-bacterial meningitis, it seems that doing laboratory tests, despite aggressive, is the best practice for differentiating between types of meningitis and the fast performance of it could somewhat prevent the improper antibiotic therapy.