Objective To describe the psychological impact on women of being tested for human papillomavirus (HPV) when smear test results are borderline or mildly dyskaryotic. Design Cross sectional questionnaire study. Setting Two centres participating in an English pilot study of HPV testing in women with borderline or mildly dyskaryotic smear test results. Participants Women receiving borderline or mil...

Tuberculosis (TB) is a serious and important public health issue to be addressed in India. Timely diagnosis of the drug resistance tuberculosis essential ensure initiate appropriate therapy. The detection resistant Mycobacterium (MTB) cases smear-negative clinical diagnosed pulmonary TB. A prospective case-control study was conducted on 473 samples received at tertiary care center from January ...

BACKGROUND Nucleic acid amplification (NAA) testing for Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) offers improved diagnostic accuracy, compared with smear microscopy, in differentiating MTB from other mycobacteria. We aimed to evaluate the reliability and projected impact of NAA testing in patients with acid-fast bacilli (AFB) smear-positive respiratory samples. METHODS We identified a retrospective c...

BACKGROUND Quick diagnosis of smear-negative pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) and extra-pulmonary TB are urgently needed in clinical diagnosis. Our research aims to investigate the usefulness of the interferon-γ release assay (IGRA) for the diagnosis of smear-negative pulmonary and extra-pulmonary TB. METHODS We performed TB antibody and TB-IGRA tests on 389 pulmonary TB patients (including 120 sm...

BACKGROUND Monitoring the treatment outcomes of tuberculosis and determining the specific factors associated with unsuccessful treatment outcome are essential to evaluate the effectiveness of tuberculosis control program. This study aimed to assess treatment outcomes and explore the factors associated with unsuccessful outcomes among new pulmonary smear positive and negative tuberculosis patien...

Rationale. Contact investigation is an established tool for early case detection of tuberculosis (TB). In India, contact investigation is not often conducted, despite national policy, and the yield of contact investigation is not well described. Objective. To determine the yield of evaluating household contacts of sputum smear-positive TB cases in Rajnandgaon district, Chhattisgarh, India. Meth...

Objective-To assess correlation between nonspecific cervicitis, inflammation, or exudate on cervical smears tests and confirmed presence of known cervical pathogens. Design-Investigation of women attending a family practice clinic for smear test by microbiological screening for Chlamydia. trachomatis, Mycoplasma hominis, Ureaplama urealyticum, Trichomonas vaginalis, Candida species, group B str...

BACKGROUND The 2007 World Health Organization (WHO) guideline to diagnose smear-negative tuberculosis (TB) in HIV-prevalent settings was mainly based on expert advice and therefore requires evaluation in real life situations. METHODS In 2009, this guideline was introduced at the ALERT hospital in Ethiopia. From October 2009 to January 2011, the accuracy of the guideline was evaluated using My...