Clinical presentations and outcomes of patients with Ebola virus disease in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Background: Clinical and laboratory data were collected and analysed from patients with Ebola virus disease (EVD) in Jui Government Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where patients with EVD were received and/or treated from October 1, 2014 to March 21, 2015 during the West Africa EVD outbreak.

Methods: The study admitted 285 patients with confirmed EVD and followed them up till the endpoint (recovery or death). EVD was confirmed by quantitative RT-PCR assays detecting blood Ebola virus (EBOV).

Results: Among the 285 lab-confirmed EVD cases in Jui Government Hospital, 146 recovered and 139 died, with an overall survival rate of 51.23 %. Patients under the age of 6 years had a lower survival rate (37.50 %). Most non-survivors (79.86 %) died within 7 days after admission and the mean hospitalization time for non-survivors was 5.56 ± 6.11 days. More than half survivors (63.69 %) turned blood EBOV negative within 3 weeks after admission and the mean hospitalization time for survivors was 20.38 ± 7.58 days. High blood viral load (≥10 copies/ml) was found to be predictive of the non-survival outcome as indicated by the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. The probability of patients' survival was less than 15 % when blood viral load was greater than 10 copies/ml. Multivariate analyses showed that blood viral load (P = 0.005), confusion (P = 0.010), abdominal pain (P = 0.003), conjunctivitis (P = 0.035), and vomiting (P = 0.004) were factors independently associated with the outcomes of EVD patients.

Conclusions: Most death occurred within 1 week after admission, and patients at the age of 6 or younger had a lower survival rate. Most surviving patients turned blood EBOV negative within 1-4 weeks after admission. Factors such as high blood viral load, confusion, abdominal pain, vomiting and conjunctivitis were associated with poor prognosis for EVD patients.