Background: There is growing evidence that diabetes mellitus (DM) is an important risk factor for tuberculosis (TB). A significant number of DM patients have poor glycemic control. This study was carried out to find the impact of poor glycemic control on newly diagnosed smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus in a tertiary care hospital.Methods: In a hospita...

BACKGROUND In tuberculosis (TB) endemic parts of the world, patients with pulmonary symptoms are managed as "smear-negative TB patients" if they do not improve on a two-week presumptive, broad-spectrum course of antibiotic treatment even if they are TB microscopy smear negative. These patients are frequently HIV positive and have a higher mortality than smear-positive TB patients. Lack of acces...

BACKGROUND Early diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB) is a major key for effective TB program. Evaluation of delay in diagnosis of smear positive TB is needed to evaluation of TB program situation in each country. The aim of this study was to evaluate of diagnosis delay in smear positive tuberculosis patients in Islamic Republic of Iran. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this cross sectional study, all smea...

From January 1995 to August 1997 we evaluated prospectively the clinical presentation, laboratory findings and short-term survival of smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) patients who sought care at our hospital. After providing informed, written consent, the patients were interviewed and laboratory tests were performed. Information about survivorship and death was collected through Septe...

BACKGROUND Thoracoscopic pleural biopsy is often required for rapid and confirmative diagnosis in patients with suspected pleural tuberculosis (PL-TB). However, this method is more invasive and costly than its alternatives. Therefore, we evaluated the clinical utility of the chest computed tomography (CT)-based bronchial aspirate (BA) TB-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test in such patients. ...

Performance of the Xpert MTB/RIF assay, designed to simultaneously detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) and rifampin (RIF) resistance, has been well documented in low-resource settings with high TB-incidence. However, few studies have assessed its accuracy in low TB incidence settings. We evaluated the performance of Xpert MTB/RIF using clinical sputum specimens routinely collected ...

We have prospectively analyzed three antigens for serodiagnosis of tuberculosis (TB). These antigens were tuberculous glycolipid antigen, lypoarabinomannan polysaccharide antigen, and antigen 60 (A60), which was derived from purified protein derivatives. Of the 131 patients with active pulmonary TB, 57 were both smear and culture negative and 14 had chronic active pulmonary TB that remained sme...

BACKGROUND Smear-positive pulmonary TB is the most infectious form of TB. Previous studies on the effect of HIV and antiretroviral therapy on TB treatment outcomes among these highly infectious patients demonstrated conflicting results, reducing understanding of important issues. METHODS All adult smear-positive pulmonary TB patients diagnosed between 2008 and 2010 in Malawi's largest public,...

BACKGROUND The challenge of diagnosing smear-negative pulmonary TB (tuberculosis) in people living with HIV justifies the use of instruments other than the smear test for diagnosing the disease. Considering the clinical-radiological similarities of TB amongst HIV-infected adults and children, the proposal of this study was to assess the accuracy of a scoring system used to diagnose smear-negati...

rate of the algorithm of 39% (12 of 31) is somewhat misleading. This rate includes both patients for whom isolation was delayed for >24 hours (n=7) or not implemented (n=5) and does not differentiate by level of infectiousness. Of the 12 patients with pulmonary TB who were not placed in negative-pressure isolation rooms within 24 hours of admission to the MGH, 5 were AFB smear-positive, 6 were ...