Original article
English
Abdulhamed Ali Mahmoud Elorfi 1, Amal Ben Amer 1, Malkit Singh 1, Abu Said Muhamed Giasuddin 2.
1-Departments of Internal Medicine (DermatologyUnit) and 2-Laboratory Medicine (Clinical Immunology Unit), Faculty of Medicine, Al-Arab Medical University, Benghazi, Libya
J Bahrain Med Soc. Vol. 13, No.3 January 2001:36
Abstract
The mean age-at-onset of leprosy was investigated restrospectively in 154 Libyan patients (133 males, 21 females). The overall mean age-at-onset was 32.91 ± 14.69 years and no significant difference was noted between males and females (33.64 ± 14.82 vs 27.32 ± 13.79 years, P = 0.063). Majority of the patients (106/1 54, 68.8%) had age-at-onset between >10-40 years. The peak incidence of 33.08% (44/1 33) in males and 38.09% (8/21) in females were in the age range of >20-40 years. The lowest age-at-onset was 7 years in a male patient with Neuritic Leprosy (NL), while the highest age-at-onset was 84 years in also a male patient but with Lepromatous Leprosy (LL). According to the type of leprosy, no significant differences were observed between males and females for mean age-at-onset in LL, Borderline Lepromatous (BL) and Borderline Borderline (BB) (P>0.05), while it was significant in Borderline Tuberculoid (BT) (P<.05) and NL (P<0.01). Comparison of our results with similar data reported from other countries indicated that age-at-onset of leprosy differ significantly from region to region of the world. Keywords: Leprosy, Onset, Prevalence, Libya Link/DOI: