Clinical characteristics of hand, foot and mouth disease caused by coxsackievirus A6 in different age groups / 中华实验和临床病毒学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective@#To analyze the clinical characteristics of hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) caused by coxsackievirus A6 (CV-A6) in different age groups.@*Methods@#From January 2015 to December 2017, throat swabs were collected from children with or suspected of having HFMD then quantitative real-time PCR was performed to detect enterovirus nucleic acid. HFMD cases caused by CV-A6 were divided into different groups according to age for comparison.@*Results@#In total, there were 467 cases of HFMD caused by CV-A6 with the age ranging from 3 months to 16 years. There were 273 cases in the infants and young children group (< 3 years old), 131 cases in the pre-school group (3-6 years old), and 63 cases in the school-age group (> 6 years old). The peak incidence was found between May and November.Fever was the common symptom, and the rate of fever in infant group was the highest (220/273, 80.5%); The proportion of cases with leucocyte elevation in the infant group was the highest (127/273, 46.5%) than that in the school-age group (17/63, 27.0%) with a statistical significance. The skin erythra of the HFMD caused by CV-A6 were diverse in forms. Over two forms of skin erythra accounted for 53.9% (257/476) of all cases, and the cases in the infant group showing more forms of skin erythra (163/273, 59.7%). The oral herpes were mainly distributed in the upper palate and pharyngeal isthmus, but the school age group had the least number of distribution sites (0.89±0.86). The cases in the infant group showed higher incidence of skin rash at the elbow joint (109/273, 39.9%), knee (88/273, 32.6%), thigh (112/273, 41%), buttock (122/273, 44.7%) than the other two groups, However, the school age group showed lower incidence of skin rash in the lower leg (0/63, 0%) and thigh (6/63, 9.5%) than the other two groups. The differences between groups were statistically significant. All cases were cured clinically, no severe cases occurred. Among the 288 cases followed up for 6 months, 33 (33/288, 11.5%) suffered from nail exfoliation.@*Conclusions@#Different age groups of HFMD caused by CV-A6 had different clinical manifestations. In the infant group, more cases had fever and the erythra were more diverse in forms and wider in distribution. In addition, the increased leukocytes in routine blood test was also more common in the infant group.