Introduction

Adenovirus infections have a heterogeneous clinical presentation and are an important cause of childhood morbidity. They are frequently and unnecessarily treated with antibiotics. In this study, we analysed the characteristic of patients with adenovirus infections in order to determine whether they differed from those of patients with bacterial infection.

Patients and methods

The study included 174 patients admitted to a tertiary care hospital between January 2009 and August 2017 who tested positive for adenovirus. We analysed the clinical and laboratory findings in these patients and compared them to those of a group of patients that received a diagnosis of confirmed bacterial infection in the same hospital in 2016.

Results

The incidence of adenovirus was of 1.58 cases per 100 admissions. Sixty-four percent of the sample was male, and the mean age was 17 months. Patients that presented with gastrointestinal symptoms alone were younger and had more favourable laboratory findings compared to patients with respiratory symptoms alone. Coinfection with another virus was found in 24.5%, and this group had a longer length of stay (7.93 versus 6.17 days, p = 0.006). We found no significant differences in the laboratory criteria indicative of severe bacterial infection between the patients with adenovirus infection and the controls with a confirmed bacterial infection except for a very small, although statistically significant, difference in the levels of C-reactive protein.

Conclusions

The clinical and laboratory parameters analysed in our study are not sufficient to discriminate between bacterial infection and adenovirus infection. Thus, it would be appropriate to rule out adenovirus infection before initiating antibiotic treatment.

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