↓ Skip to main content

The clinical implications of thrombocytopenia in adults with severe falciparum malaria: a retrospective analysis

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Medicine, April 2015
Altmetric Badge

About this Attention Score

  • Good Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (72nd percentile)

Mentioned by

twitter
9 X users
facebook
2 Facebook pages

Citations

dimensions_citation
42 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
86 Mendeley
You are seeing a free-to-access but limited selection of the activity Altmetric has collected about this research output. Click here to find out more.
Title
The clinical implications of thrombocytopenia in adults with severe falciparum malaria: a retrospective analysis
Published in
BMC Medicine, April 2015
DOI 10.1186/s12916-015-0324-5
Pubmed ID
Authors

Josh Hanson, Nguyen Hoan Phu, Mahtab Uddin Hasan, Prakaykaew Charunwatthana, Katherine Plewes, Richard J Maude, Panote Prapansilp, Hugh WF Kingston, Saroj K Mishra, Sanjib Mohanty, Ric N Price, M Abul Faiz, Arjen M Dondorp, Nicholas J White, Tran Tinh Hien, Nicholas PJ Day

Abstract

Thrombocytopenia is a common finding in adults with severe falciparum malaria, but its clinical and prognostic utility is incompletely defined. Clinical and laboratory data from 647 adults with severe falciparum malaria were analysed retrospectively to determine the relationship between a patient's platelet count on admission to hospital and their subsequent clinical course. On admission, 614 patients (94.9%) were thrombocytopenic (platelet count <150 × 10(9)/L) and 328 (50.7%) had a platelet count <50 × 10(9)/L. The admission platelet count was inversely correlated with parasite biomass (estimated from plasma PfHRP2 concentrations, rs = -0.28, P = 0.003), the degree of microvascular sequestration (measured with orthogonal polarizing spectral imaging, rs = -0.31, P = 0.001) and disease severity (the number of World Health Organization severity criteria satisfied by the patient, rs = -0.21, P <0.001). Platelet counts were lower on admission in the patients who died (median: 30 (interquartile range 22 to 52) × 10(9)/L versus 50 (34 to 78) × 10(9)/L in survivors; P <0.001), but did not predict outcome independently from other established laboratory and clinical prognostic indices. The 39 patients (6%) with profound thrombocytopenia (platelet count <20 × 10(9)/L) were more likely to die (odds ratio: 5.00, 95% confidence interval: 2.56 to 9.75) than patients with higher platelet counts, but these high-risk patients could be identified more rapidly with simple bedside clinical assessment. The admission platelet count did not reliably identify the 50 patients (7.7%) with major bleeding during the study. Thrombocytopenia is a marker of disease severity in adults with falciparum malaria, but has limited utility in prognostication, triage and management.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 9 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 86 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 86 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 16 19%
Researcher 9 10%
Student > Bachelor 9 10%
Student > Ph. D. Student 8 9%
Other 6 7%
Other 14 16%
Unknown 24 28%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 40 47%
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 5 6%
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology 4 5%
Immunology and Microbiology 3 3%
Nursing and Health Professions 2 2%
Other 8 9%
Unknown 24 28%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 06 June 2017.
All research outputs
#6,100,020
of 22,800,560 outputs
Outputs from BMC Medicine
#2,330
of 3,421 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#72,017
of 265,147 outputs
Outputs of similar age from BMC Medicine
#68
of 83 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,800,560 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 73rd percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 3,421 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 43.5. This one is in the 31st percentile – i.e., 31% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 265,147 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 72% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 83 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 18th percentile – i.e., 18% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.