BACKGROUND Introduction of GeneXpert MTB/RIF (Xpert) assay has constituted a major breakthrough for tuberculosis (TB) diagnostics. Several patient factors may influence diagnostic performance of Xpert including sputum quality. OBJECTIVE We carried out a prospective, observational, cross-sectional study to determine the effect of sputum quality on diagnostic performance of Xpert among presumed...

BACKGROUND Tuberculous sputum provides a sample of bacilli that must be eliminated by chemotherapy and that may go on to transmit infection. A preliminary observation that Mycobacterium tuberculosis cells contain triacylglycerol lipid bodies in sputum, but not when growing in vitro, led us to investigate the extent of this phenomenon and its physiological basis. METHODS AND FINDINGS Microscop...

A polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based assay was developed for the detection of Pneumocystis carinii DNA in induced sputum and bronchoscopic alveolar lavage samples. The primer pair was selected from the published sequence of the thymidylate synthase gene of P. carinii derived from infected rats. The amplified DNA fragment of 403 bp was detected by agarose gel electrophoresis and by Southern a...

Melioidosis, infection caused by Burkholderia pseudomallei, is increasingly reported in Cambodia. We hypothesized that implementation of an enhanced sputum testing protocol in a provincial hospital diagnostic microbiology laboratory would increase detection of B. pseudomallei. We tested 241 sputum specimens that were deemed acceptable for culture, comparing culture in selective enrichment broth...

conclusions concurrent pulmonary nocardiosis and tuberculosis is frequent in hiv-infected patients. rapid and sensitive methods such as pcr are recommended for detection of such co-infections. results from 157 sputum specimens, positive samples by acid fast staining, culture and pcr for m. tuberculosis were reported for 7.6% (12/157), 10.1% (16/157) and 7% (11/157) of samples, respectively. no ...

This study evaluated the efficacy of penicillin in improving culture yield M. Tuberculosis cases pulmonary tuberculosis. A retrospective was conducted Department Pathology, MMDC, Multan. total 350 suspected tuberculosis patients were selected for study. An early morning sputum specimen collected. NAOH citrate and N-acetyl-L-cysteine used digesting, decontaminating, homogenizing sputum. The samp...

BACKGROUND The majority of patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in South Africa are co-infected with HIV, but the radiographic features of MDR-TB and their relationship with time to sputum culture conversion in the antiretroviral therapy era have not been described. METHODS We reviewed baseline chest radiographs for 56 patients with MDR-TB from a rural area of South Africa....

BACKGROUND Diagnostic options for pulmonary tuberculosis in resource-poor settings are commonly limited to smear microscopy. We investigated whether bleach concentration by sedimentation and sputum cytology analysis (SCA) increased the positivity rate of smear microscopy for smear-positive tuberculosis. METHODS We did a prospective diagnostic study in a Médecins Sans Frontières-supported hosp...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to assess the frequency of premalignant and malignant cells in sputum from patients with lung cancer and to measure the dependence of these cells on cancer stage, histologic type, tumor size, and tumor location. METHODS This analysis included 444 patients with lung cancer. First, all patients were asked to produce sputum spontaneously; then, they und...