Introduction: Neutropenia is one of the most common complications in children with cancer, and it's the most important parameter to determine infection risk. In neutropenic patients the signs and symptoms could be scarce and in occasions fever could be the only symptom. For these reasons all patients with febrile neutropenia (FN) should be considered as if they had a possibly severe disease.
Aim: To describe the clinical characteristics and laboratory parameters observed in cancer patients with FN attended at our hospital to perform a more rational management of this complication in the future.
Patients and methods: The clinical files accumulated during 36 months, belonging to patients aged 0 to 15 years that were hospitalized because of cancer and FN were reviewed.
Results: In this series the source of fever was found in 48.6% of 105 NF episodes, and bacteria were isolated from blood or urine culture in 38%. The most frequent bacterial species recovered were methicillin susceptible S. aureus (20.8%) and ESBL negative E. coli (20.8%). Piperacillin/tazobactam was the most used first line antibiotic prescribed (87.6%) and meropenem was the second choice (18%). Granulocyte colony stimulating factor was used in 61.9% of the cases and episodes mortality rate was 6.7%.
Conclusion: Clinical characteristics and bacteriological findings in our institution do not differ significantly from what has been described for pediatric cancer patients in other series.