Source: Trop Med Int Health  |  Posted 9 years ago

The prevalence of amoebic colitis among patients with acute diarrhoea at a clinic in Cairo, Egypt, has been found to be unexpectedly high.

Researchers at University Hospital, Cairo, Egypt, and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, studied 84 consecutive patients with acute diarrhoea of less than one week duration at an out-patient tropical medicine clinic. Controls were 182 healthy regional people and 64 patients complaining of diarrhoea lasting longer than a week.

The diagnosis of amoebic colitis was established by the presence of []Entamoeba histolytica[] galactose-inhibitable lectin antigen and of occult blood in stool using antigen-detection enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).

[]Entamoeba histolytica[] infection was found in well over half (57.1 percent) of the patients with acute diarrhoea. This was more than double the rate of the infection in the healthy controls (21.4 percent) or in the patients with prolonged diarrhoea (25.0 percent).

On the other hand, the prevalence rates of Entamoeba dispar infection in the two control groups (20.3-24.2 percent) were much higher than in those with acute diarrhoea (8.3 percent).

Of the 84 patients with acute diarrhoea, 32 (38.1 percent) had amoebic colitis. Of those 32 patients, all but one had at least one positive assay for serum amoebic antibodies.