Longitudinal Hospital-Based Dengue Study

Since 1998, Dr. Eva Harris and her collaborators at the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health have conducted a longitudinal hospital-based study on pediatric clinical dengue.  In  2005 Sustainable Sciences Institute was awarded a Pacific South-West Regional Centers of Excellence (RCE) to continue the hospital study and as such manages the operational and logistical aspects in the ground and is responsible for financial and technical oversight. Dr. Angel Balamseda, Director of the Virology Program at SSI Nicaragua and Head of the National Virology Laboratory at the National Center for Diagnosis and Reference of the MOH, is the local Principal Investigator.

The study, based at the Hospital Infantíl Manuel del Jesús Rivera, “la Mascota” in Managua, enrolls children who are hospitalized for dengue and meet the inclusion criteria for the study (age, days of symptoms onset, consent, etc). An average of 200 cases a year with different degrees of severity are enrolled during the approximate 6 month-long dengue season in Managua (August-January). The study provides additional clinical care with designated study doctors and monitors patients during illness and a convalescent follow up. High quality clinical samples from this study are used for an expanding number of projects that provide important clinical, immunological and virological data and will allow the scientific community to unravel the epidemiology and pathology of this vector-borne disease.

In 2010, SSI became a member of the NIH-supported multicentric and multinational Dengue Population Genetics Program (Download a PDF newsletter about the program). SSI contributes with retrospectively and prospectively collected samples through the Pediatric Dengue Cohort Study and the Hospital-based study and the accompanying clinical and laboratory data, extracted from the study databases in harmonized data collection forms by the informatics team in SSI Nicaragua. To date, the samples are providing excellent quality DNA that will be compared with the genetic material obtained from the other international sites. SSI is also in charge of quality control to partner sites in León, Nicaragua and Tegucigalpa, Honduras.