Incidence and etiological agents of concomitant acute bacterial meningitis in neonates with febrile urinary tract infection.

Abstract

Background: Concomitant Acute Bacterial Meningitis (ABM) in febrile neonates with Urinary TractInfection (UTI) considered a severe condition that may lead to permanent disabilities if it is not treatedcorrectly. In order to understand the real burden of this problem, we aimed to investigate theincidence rate of the concomitant ABM in neonates with febrile UTI. Methods: This is a retrospective study reviewing the medical records of all neonates who werepresented to the Emergency Department (ED) in a tertiary hospital, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia from 1 Mayto 31 July 2019 and diagnosed with UTI to look if they had a diagnosis of acute bacterial meningitis ornot. Result: from 159 pediatric patients presented with UTIs, there were 3 (1.9%) patients with bacterialmeningitis, two of them were males. For the neonatal age, 49 neonates presented with UTI, only onepatient (2%) was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis. The isolated organisms that caused meningitiswere: yeast, Klebsiella pneumoniae (K. pneumoniae), Escherichia coli (E.coli). Conclusion: Even though our findings suggest that the incidence of ABM among neonates who haveUTI is relatively low, it still exists, and clinicians should consider them at the same time cliniciansshould balance between benefit and harm of doing lumbar puncture to every febrile neonate. A largersample and multicenter studies must be conducted in the future to look for the issue explicitly and tomake the result applicable to the whole population.