Hematocrit as a Warning Sign for Severe Dengue Fever: A Systematic Review

Early detection of dengue with clinical severity helps in disease management and treatment.Consistently monitoring thrombocytopenia and hematocrit is important for detecting severity.This systematic review (following PRISMA guidelines) focuses on the changes in hematocrit values in dengue patients and its relationship with the prognostication at early phase of severe dengue.A total of 1003 articles were retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, and after using automation tools and removing duplicates, 13 articles were found to qualify by the inclusion criteria.The hematocrit value increased slowly at the onset of dengue infection, and as the infection kept elaborating in the patients, the value of hematocrit declined gradually.During the early stage of severe infection, the hematocrit value was found to be 44.08 4.87, while, in case of Dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF), it is decreased to 39.78 1.7.So, this rise in hematocrit at the early stage can be used as a potential predictor of the initiation of infection in the body of patients.Effective measures can be taken quickly to curb the infection as soon as possible.