Evaluation of clinical and demographic characteristics of Turkish and Syrian pediatric cutaneous leishmaniasis patients from Hatay, Turkey after the Syrian civil war

INTRODUCTION: Cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) is a skin disease affecting all ages but especially children. Cutaneous leishmaniasis exists in Turkey, and, especially together with emigration from Syria to Turkey in recent years due to the civil war in Syria, the incidence of the disease has increased. AIM: To investigate Syrian patients (SP) and Turkish patients (TP) in the pediatric age group who were diagnosed with CL and to compare the age, gender, clinical type, number of lesions, and lesion localizations of these patients. MATERIAL AND METHODS: We included CL patients aged 0-18 who were admitted to the outpatient clinic in the period 2015–2017 and in the first half of 2018. A total of 121 patients (SP, n = 87; TP, n = 34) were included in the study. RESULTS: The mean ages of TP and SP were 12.06 ±4.47 and 8.68 ±5.18 years and the disease durations were 6.25 ±3.86 and 4.73 ±3.39 months respectively (p = 0.049). The total number of lesions was 247. The mean lesion number per child was 2.35 ±2.28 in SP, and 1.23 ±0.55 in TP (p = 0.002). Two and multiple lesions were significantly higher in SP (p = 0.005). It was found that the lesions were most frequently located in the head/neck (HN) region (76.9%) and 44.1% of patients with HN localization belonged to the 7–12 age group. We also found that 57.1% of the HN lesions were of the papule type in the patients. CONCLUSIONS: We obtained similar results as in other studies in terms of age, gender, localization, and duration of lesions in general. When SP and TP were compared, we found that the number of lesions was higher, the disease duration was shorter, and the mean age was younger in SP.