Background:

Skin diseases are the common problem in our communities and clinical practices. In developing countries the prevalence ranges from 20% to 80%. In Sub-Saharan African countries including Tanzania, many previous studies were community based and very little done among admitted patients’ spectrum of diseases. In Tanzania, few studies have been done on the patterns of skin diseases among admitted patients, where in Northern zone including RDTC at KCMC Moshi, some studies have been done on patterns of skin diseases among patient attending dermatology clinics. Objectives: The main objective of this study is to determine the pattern of common skin diseases among patients admitted to the new wards of dermatology department at KCMC, Moshi Tanzania between October 2014 andSeptember2015.

Methodology:

The study design used is a hospital based descriptive cross sectional study that was conducted by reviewing records among patients admitted to new wards at KCMC hospital between October 2014 and September 2015. The required patients’ records on admission and discharge within the specified duration of time were consecutively recruited from both dermatology and medical record departments. During data collection the patients’ information were examined for the full demographic data, clinical diagnosis, duration of hospitalization and patients’ status on discharge.

Results:

This study recruited records from all admitted patients in a 12 months period, there were 163 admissions out of which only 100 patients’ records were available with all required information (61.3% response rate). There were 49 males and 51 females, the mean age was 39.31 (SD± 21.38) years. The most common skin diseases were squamous cell carcinoma (9%), atopic dermatitis (9%) as for erythroderma (9%), Kaposi sarcoma (6%), and venous ulcers (5.3%) as for xeroderma pigmentosum (5.3%), pemphigus foliaceus (3.8%), dermatomyositis and leprosy (3%) each. Other skin diseases had a prevalence less than 3%. The median duration of hospitalization was 14 days, ranging from 1 to 353 days. 88 patients improved on discharge date while 12 had poor improvement on discharge date. There were 6 mortalities due to lower prevalent life threatening diseases which included systemic lupus erythromatosus, dermatomyositis, bullous impetigo, T-cell lymphoma, toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) with Steven Johnson’s syndrome (SJS)and erythema multiforme in herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection.

Conclusion:

This study shows some similarities in patterns of the most common and severe skin diseases among inpatients with other studies in developing countries while there are differences with some studies done in other areas. The knowledge of dermatological patterns among inpatients could be important to health workers, and also provides base for further studies to be done.