Epidemio-Clinical Profile and Determinants of Paediatric ENT Pathologies in Rural Hospitals: Case of Kimpese Evangelical Medical Institute

Ear-Nose-Throat disorders in children are one of the leading causes of consultations in paediatrics, with a variety of aetiologies. The study aimed to investigate the epidemiological-clinical profile, treatment and determinants of Ear-Nose-Throat disorders in children attending the paediatric department of the KIMPESE Evangelical Medical Institute (EMI) hospital. This was a prospective cross-sectional study with a descriptive and analytical approach, which took place between October 2022 and March 2023. The KIMPESE Evangelical Medical Institute (KIMPESE/EMI/) was the setting for this study. The study included all children aged 0-16 years who had been consulted or admitted for any sign of Ear-Nose-Throat disease, whose parents had given their consent. The data collected was encoded an Excel 2016 database. They were transferred to SPSS for Windows version 21 for processing and analysis. Out of a total of 205 children cared for at the EMI, 139 had presented with at least one ENT pathology, i.e. a frequency of 67.8%. The median age of the children was 5 (2-10) years, and more than half were under 5 years of age. They were predominantly male, with a sex ratio of 1,13. The ENT pathologies presented by these children were distributed as follows: 28.8% suffered from otological pathologies, 25.4% from rhinological pathologies and 17.1% from pharyngological pathologies. The most common otological pathologies were cerumen impaction and congestive AOM, while rhinitis was the most common rhinological pathology and rhinopharyngitis was the most common pharyngological pathology. The factors associated with ENT pathologies in children, in multivariate analysis, were determined by passive smoking, a history of rhinopharyngitis, household size ≥6 people, and living in a polluted environment. This study has shown that oral diseases in children are also common in rural areas, the case of KIMPESE Evangelical Medical Institute, especially in our African countries where the population is very young. The results obtained provide ample evidence of the existence of certain factors determining the genesis of certain oral diseases in children in the town of Kimpese.