Influenza, Campylobacter and Mycoplasma infections, and hospital admissions for Guillain-Barré syndrome, England.

Clarence C Tam; Sarah J O'Brien; Laura C Rodrigues; (2006) Influenza, Campylobacter and Mycoplasma infections, and hospital admissions for Guillain-Barré syndrome, England. Emerging infectious diseases, 12 (12). pp. 1880-1887. ISSN 1080-6040 DOI: 10.3201/eid1212.051032
Copy

Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is the most common cause of acute flaccid paralysis in polio-free regions. Considerable evidence links Campylobacter infection with GBS, but evidence that implicates other pathogens as triggers remains scarce. We conducted a time-series analysis to investigate short-term correlations between weekly laboratory-confirmed reports of putative triggering pathogens and weekly hospitalizations for GBS in England from 1993 through 2002. We found a positive association between the numbers of reports of laboratory-confirmed influenza A in any given week and GBS hospitalizations in the same week. Different pathogens may trigger GBS in persons of different ages; among those <35 years, numbers of weekly GBS hospitalizations were associated with weekly Campylobacter and Mycoplasma pneumoniae reports, whereas among those >35 years, positive associations were with influenza. Further studies should estimate the relative contribution of different pathogens to GBS incidence, overall and by age group, and determine whether influenza is a real trigger for GBS or a marker for influenza vaccination.


picture_as_pdf
05-1032.pdf
subject
Published Version
Available under Creative Commons: NC-ND 3.0

View Download

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span Multiline CSV OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL EndNote HTML Citation JSON MARC (ASCII) MARC (ISO 2709) METS MODS RDF+N3 RDF+N-Triples RDF+XML RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer Simple Metadata ASCII Citation EP3 XML
Export

Downloads