Perfil de morbimortalidade hospitalar por hanseníase no Brasil.

Abstract

Currently Leprosy is considered a public health problem by the functional disabilities caused by the disease when not early treated, furthermore due to the fact that Brazil has the secondhighest global prevalence of leprosy, this study aims to discuss the clinical-epidemiological profile of morbimortality caused by leprosy in the Brazilian regions between 2010 and 2014. Leprosy is an infectious-contagious disease treatable in Primary Care, for this reason hospital morbimortality is directly linked to late diagnosis and, therefore, Primary Health Care mechanism’s failure. This work is an ecological, retrospective, descriptive and quantitative study, with data obtained of the Department of Health. The study found that there were 27,798 hospitalizations and 348 deaths in that time period. The rate of hospitalizations by region discreetly fluctuated over the years, but there was no significant reduction of this rate at the end of 2014 (reduction of only 2.46%); given the difference in the reduction rate of Leprosy new cases in Brazil in the same period, 11%. There was a growing trend of hospitalizations in the southern region, furthermore men were hospitalized almost twice as often as women in all regions of the country. More hospitalizations were observed in the fourth and fifth decades of life and there was a preponderance of hospitalizations in the public sector only in the Northeast when compared to the private sector. It was also observed a higher mortality rate in the Northeast region (2011- 2014) when compared to the other regions. On average, annual hospitalization costs in Brazil are around three million annually. It is concluded that the present study helps to understand the existence of flaws in the mechanisms of early diagnosis of the disease, since sequels due to late diagnosis are the main causes of hospitalization and death due to leprosy.