Abstract:
Background: Non-communicable diseases, which are the common reasons of admissions to
Internal Medicine in developed countries, are nowadays becoming the most prevalent in
developing countries. However, data about patients’ profiles in tertiary hospitals and their
associated outcomes is rare. Therefore, this study aims at assessing patients’ profiles and their
associated outcomes in the internal medicine wards at the tertiary hospital.
Methods: This prospective and descriptive cohort study was conducted at the Centre Hospitalier
Universitaire de Kigali on 176 patients admitted from the emergency room to medical wards from
December 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020. Socio-demographic variables, initial laboratory variables,
diagnoses at discharge and outcomes after two weeks were recorded. The ICD 10 Version: 2019
was used for categorizing the diagnoses. Data entry was done with Microsoft Excel 2010 and then
data were exported into SPSS windows 16.0 for analysis.
Results: A total of 176 patients were enrolled with the male to female ratio of 1:1.66. The young
and middle aged group (16-65 years) represented 76.71%, and the mean age was 48.8 years. The
leading reasons of admission were circulatory system diseases 44.88% (n=79) followed by the
respiratory system diseases 27.84% (n=49) and infectious and parasitic diseases 26.14%(n=46).
Moreover, the overall leading diagnosis was pneumonia accounting for 8.23% (n=29) of diagnoses
and it was followed by congestive heart failure with 5.40% (n=19). Most of participants were
discharged 59.09% and death rate was 10.8%. Lastly, tachycardia, bradycardia and anemia,
systolic hypotension, systolic hypertension and low GCS were strongly linked with significant risk
of mortality (P value ≤ 0.05).
Conclusions: There was a noticeable double burden of NCDs and communicable diseases among
the studied population. However, the NCDs were more commonly observed than communicable
diseases among admissions. Therefore, much effort should be put in raising and strengthening the
awareness and preventive measures of both the NCDs and communicable diseases.
