Prevalence of Previous Rheumatic Fever and Heart Sequela among Primary School Children in Diyarbakır Province

In the 1984-1985 academic year, among 4065 students who were randomly selected from primary school children in Diyarbakır city center with a systematic sampling rate of 10%, the rate of rheumatic fever by using a questionnaire was found to be 9.1%. This rate is higher than the rates found in studies conducted in other regions of our country. When the anamnesis of these children were deepened retrospectively, the fact that at the time of diagnosis, most of the children had only extremity pain and no examination was performed, it was thought that some of these pains may have occurred due to reasons other than rheumatic fever. Because of the retrospective diagnosis, the rate of major findings was lower than that reported in the literature. The distribution of patients with rheumatic fever history and valvular lesions by gender did not show a significant difference in accordance with the literature. The distribution of children with valve damage by age has increased gradually in accordance with the literature. Valvule lesion was found in 1.2% in our study. These values ​​are lower than the values ​​reported from Iran, but higher than the values ​​reported in other developing countries and in our country. In the examination of valvule lesions, it was observed that, in accordance with the data in the literature, the most frequent mitral valve involvement was followed by aortic valve involvement. Again, in accordance with the literature, the most common type of valve lesion was mitral insufficiency. Unlike the difference reported in the literature, both mitral and aortic involvement did not differ significantly according to gender. In the retrospective examination of the anamnesis of the cases with valve involvement, no complaints were found by reducing rheumatic fever in 37.2% of the cases. This situation was attributed to the symptoms being mild and forgotten or the occurrence of carditis without other major findings.