Study design; The study is prospective cross-sectional design
Study area; Ibrahim Malik Teaching Hospital is a national hospital provides medical care as well as g medical education to students at medical colleges and other health institutions. It’s located in El Sahafa, south of Khartoum. The hospital comprises all medical specialties in addition to supporting units. The hospital capacity is 231 beds. The working staffs in hospitals are composed of doctors and other medical staff members, in addition to non-medical administrative staff as well as ancillary staff. The study will be conducted at the pediatric emergency department which is composed of 29 beds short stay plus 4 beds as pediatric high dependency unit PHDU & 10 beds in the nursery.
Study population; The study population will be pediatric patients aged 6 to 60 months who are attending the emergency department at Ibrahim Malik Teaching Hospital who presented with febrile seizures as defined below in the diagnosis criteria section.
Study period;
The study period extended from January to march 2022
Inclusion criteria; Any febrile seizure patient aged 6 to 60 months attending the hospital during the study period
Diagnosis criteria ; Any convulsions (generalized or localized) in a child aged 6 to 60 months, not known to be epileptic or known case of any chronic illness, associated with fever due to infection (bacterial-viral-fungal or parasitic).
Exclusion criteria;
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Children with preexisting neurological abnormality, or central nervous system infection
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Seizure following trauma, drug or toxin intake
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Children whom parent/guardian refused to participate in the study
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Children with known chronic illness to (Diabetes mellitus-chronic kidney disease -hepatitis B,C -celiac disease and HIV + ve patients)
Sample size; we assumed that the prevalence of febrile seizures to be 50%, so by using the formula:
Where: n: sample size. Z: is 1.96 (95% confidence interval). P: prevalence (0.05). q: 1 - p = (.95).
d: the margin of error = 0.05.
Calculated sample size was = 115
Sampling technique; sampled patient will be chosen using simple random sampling.
Variables;
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Independent variable: Age, sex, parent’s consanguinity, birth order, and number of attacks.
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Dependent variables: Serum sodium level, serum potassium level, blood glucose level, body temperature..
Data collection method; Data will be obtained from blood samples drawn immediately after the convulsion subsided (for serum sodium) as well as information from the patient’s parents in Ibrahim Malik Hospital. The data will be collected using semi-structured questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of 2 sections: demographic data and laboratory results sections.
Questionnaire pretest; will be performed on multiple patients on difference days to increase the reliability. The procedure uses a cognitive interviewing approach because it provides a view of how respondents process their questionnaire responses.
Data collectors; a group of 5 data collectors (medical school graduates including myself) will be trained and provided with the knowledge required to complete the research data collection
The blood samples will be collected by the duty nurses and send to Ibrahim malik teaching hospital labratory for analysis.
Serum sodium level less than 135 meq / L was considered as low sodium level (hyponatremia).
Data analysis; Data will be managed using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) software version 25. Categorical data will be presented as percentages and frequencies, while continuous data will be presented as means and standard deviations. For inferential statistics, One-way analysis of variance will be used to test for differences in sodium levels among the groups, and Pearson correlation between continuous and categorical variables. 95% confidence intervals will be obtained and a p-value of less than 0.05 will be considered statistically significant.
Ethical considerations;
The ethical clearance from the institutional review board at El NEELAIN UNIVERSITY.
Permission from the Sudan ministry of health.
Written consent from patient’s parents was obtained.