Background and objectives

The most common cause of thrombocytopenia is an infection. Fever with thrombocytopenia helps to narrow the differential diagnosis and management of patients in countries like ours where cost effective investigations and management is vital.

Methods

The method applied involved including in the study 100 patients experiencing thrombocytopenia and fever of age >12 years, the study took place between july 2017 and July 2018.

Results

The commonest infection from the study was malaria while the commonest cause of thrombocytopenia with fever was an infection. Among the candidates studied, 30% of them had bleeding manifestations in form of  petichae/purpura and  spontaneous bleeding. 90% of patients had good recovery while 10% of patients had mortality.  Regarding the deaths, septicaemia with MODS accounted for 84% while rest expired because of hemorrhagic manifestations.

Interpretation and conclusion

The commonest cause of fever with thrombocytopenia was infectious cause like malaria and dengue.Thrombocytopenia was transient and asymptomatic in the majority of patients.Bleeding manifestations were significant in patients with severe thrombocytopenia when platelets were less than 10000 in the form of spontaneous bleeding and petichia/purpura.Thrombocytoenia recovered spontaneously and within a week on treating the cause in majority of cases.