Pattern of cardiac disease among patients admitted to Jimma university medical centre’s medical wards

Abstract

Back ground: There is a substantial regional variation and evolvements on the type of underlying causes of heart disease across different part of the world. Cardiac disease is the single most common reason of admission at Jimma University Centre throughout the year. It is thus important to know the underlying patterns of cardiac disease as it is an essential in tackling the problem both as primary prevention as well help the institution get ready for early treatment of common underlying cardiac diseases. Objectives: To discern patterns of cardiac disease among patients admitted to Jimma University medical center, medical wards from November 2016 to July, 2017. Methodology: A hospital based cross-sectional study was employed. Ethical clearance was obtained. A pretested questionnaire was used to collect a data on socio-demographic data, clinical history and physical examination. A type of underlying heart disease was made based on the standard definition but tailored to our setup. The collected data was entered in to SPSS version 20 and was analyzed to valuable information based on the set of variables. Results : A total of 278 cardiac patients were studied. The mean age was 49.6 (SD+16.8). Males constitute 141 (50.7%) of the population. Ischemic heart disease accounted for 100 (36.8%) of the total cardiac cases followed by Rheumatic heart disease 48 (16.3%); dilated cardiomyopathy 43 (16%) and hypertensive heart disease 40 (15%). Corpulmonale, Pericardial disease, high output failure, and congenital heart diseases were responsible for 27 (10%), 6 (2%), 3 (1.1%) and 2(.7%) of the total cases, respectively. A total of 246 (88.5%) had a clinical heart failure diagnosis at admission. Atrial fibrillation was present in 18.7% of study participants. Conclusions : Ischemic heart disease is on the rise as a major leading underlying type of heart disease in south west of Ethiopia. Further study is needed to determine the burden this diseases at community setting