Prevalence of cytomegalovirus infection in hospitalized infants.

Unlabelled: Data on cytomegalovirus infection (CMV) prevalence and course in hospitalized infants are rather scarce, obsolete and considerably inconsistent.

Aim: to determine the prevalence, rate of clinical manifestations, risk factors and predictive capacity of clinical manifestations of CMV infection in hospitalized infants during their first year of life.

Patients And Methods: All 163 infants hospitalized in the Pediatric Ward for Nonrespiratory Pathology in a tertiary hospital were serologically screened for cytomegalovirus infection for 10 months. In infants up to 6 months old that were CMV IgG (+) and CMV IgM (-) we followed up the CMV IgG concentration or compared it with that of their mothers.

Results: The CMV prevalence for the entire study sample was 33.1 +/- 3.7% (54 seropositive out of 163 examined infants); in newborns it was 19.4 +/- 6.7% (7 of 36), in infants aged 1-3 months--23.8 +/- 5.4% (15 of 63), in 4-6-month olds--28.1 +/- 8.1% (9 of 32), and in 7-12-month old--71.9 +/- 8.1% (23 of 32). The rates of clinically apparent infections in the respective groups was 33.3 +/- 6.5%, 57.01 +/- 20.2%, 53.3 +/- 13.3%, 33.3 +/- 16.6%, and 13.0 +/- 7.17%. The overall rate of clinically apparent CMV infection in all 163 children was between 11.0 +/- 2.5% and 17.2 +/- 2.9%. The probability of CMV infection increased with age and duration of breastfeeding. Hepatitis, cerebral vasculopathy and pneumonia (alone or combined) turned out to be predictors of CMV infection, but none of these symptoms had a frequency greater than 22%.

Conclusions: We found a high rate of cytomegalovirus infections in hospitalized infants less than one year of age. This infection is the reason why at least 10% of the newborns and 12% of the children aged 1 to 3 months were hospitalised. The course was clinically apparent in over half of the infected children of up to 3 months of age.