letter to the editor in relation to the paper Spectrum of clinical disease in a serie of 135 hospitalised HIV-infected patients from north India
Cintia Santos, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul - Pós-Graduação Ciências Médicas
30 December 2004
The authors described a series of 135 consecutive patients with HIV-infected admitted to a tertiary level teaching hospital and referral center located in north India. It is surprising of that only 135 patients were admitted during 2000-2003, since the catchment area of that hospital includes the New Delhi national capital territory and neighbouring states mainly, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Uttharanchal, Haryana, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.
The authors stated that “patients at times were too sick to undergo invasive diagnostic procedures” and adopted several different criteria to detect the opportunist infections. Since it is feasible that patients presented more than one opportunist infection, we would like to know if all patients were investigated for all possible opportunistic infections or if the diagnostic procedures were demanded by clinical findings. A table summarizing these results would be required.
Table 1 shows an excessive number of occupational categories, which could be replaced by number of years at school, since the purpose was merely the description of the studied population. The symptoms presented in Table 2 would be more informative whether the frequency of symptoms have been described according to the specific opportunistic infection.
Finally, Table 4 shows that most of the patients would benefit of antiretroviral treatment and only 50 patients actually received it. It deserves further explanations, as well as the small number of patients who were followed-up. Since these patients did not represent the whole sample the results might not be presented.
Competing interests
We do not have financial or other relationships that might lead to a conflict of interest.
letter to the editor in relation to the paper Spectrum of clinical disease in a serie of 135 hospitalised HIV-infected patients from north India
30 December 2004
The authors described a series of 135 consecutive patients with HIV-infected admitted to a tertiary level teaching hospital and referral center located in north India. It is surprising of that only 135 patients were admitted during 2000-2003, since the catchment area of that hospital includes the New Delhi national capital territory and neighbouring states mainly, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Uttharanchal, Haryana, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.
The authors stated that “patients at times were too sick to undergo invasive diagnostic procedures” and adopted several different criteria to detect the opportunist infections. Since it is feasible that patients presented more than one opportunist infection, we would like to know if all patients were investigated for all possible opportunistic infections or if the diagnostic procedures were demanded by clinical findings. A table summarizing these results would be required.
Table 1 shows an excessive number of occupational categories, which could be replaced by number of years at school, since the purpose was merely the description of the studied population. The symptoms presented in Table 2 would be more informative whether the frequency of symptoms have been described according to the specific opportunistic infection.
Finally, Table 4 shows that most of the patients would benefit of antiretroviral treatment and only 50 patients actually received it. It deserves further explanations, as well as the small number of patients who were followed-up. Since these patients did not represent the whole sample the results might not be presented.
Competing interests
We do not have financial or other relationships that might lead to a conflict of interest.