Clinical analysis of children with severe hand-foot-and-mouth disease in Shanghai

To retrospectively analyzed the clinical features and epidemiology of children with severe hand-foot-and-mouth disease during 2009 and 2010 in Shanghai to investigate some risk factors with fatal cases. All the clinical records and laboratory results of serious patients were collected. A retrospective study was performed. A total of 748 serious patients were enrolled into this study, and the ratio of male to female was about 1.7:1; 724 patients were categorized into stage 2 with 254 patients in 2009 and 470 in 2010; 24 patients were categorized into stage 3 with 17 in 2009 and 7 in 2010. The rate of severity in 2010 (1.5%) was lower than in 2009 (6.3%) (χ2=12.836, P