Malik, Amyn A; Khan, Uzma; Khan, Palwasha; Anwar, Aliya; Salahuddin, Naseem; Khowaja, Saira; Khan, Aamir J; Khan, Salman; Hussain, Hamidah; Amanullah, Farhana; (2022) Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Treatment Outcomes among Children and Adolescents in Karachi, Pakistan. Tropical medicine and infectious disease, 7 (12). p. 418. ISSN 2414-6366 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/tropicalmed7120418
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Abstract
BACKGROUND: Significant data gaps exist for children and adolescents with drug-resistant (DR) TB, particularly from high TB incidence settings. This report provides a descriptive analysis of programmatic outcomes among children and adolescents treated for DR-TB in Pakistan. METHODS: We extracted programmatic data from January 2014 to December 2019 from a tertiary care hospital with specialised child and adolescent DR-TB services. A physician assessed all children and adolescents (0-19 years) with presumptive DR-TB, including details of exposure to DR-TB, medical history, radiology, and laboratory results. All patients received treatment as per national DR-TB management guidelines based on WHO recommendations. RESULTS: There were 262 treatment episodes for 247 patients enrolled during the study period. The median age of the cohort was 16 years (IQR: 13-18 years) with 16 (6.1%) children being under 5 years; 237 (90.5%) patients had pulmonary TB. The majority of the patients (194 or 74.1%) experienced a favourable treatment outcome and 26 (9.9%) died while on treatment. Female patients (78.5%) were more likely to experience favourable outcomes compared to males (64.7%; chi-sqr p-value = 0.02). CONCLUSIONS: We found high rates of favourable outcomes in children and adolescents treated for DR-TB. However, there were few young children in our cohort and there was a considerable gender gap that enhanced efforts to diagnose DR-TB in young children and to elucidate and mitigate the reasons for poor outcomes amongst males.
Item Type | Article |
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Faculty and Department | Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases > Dept of Clinical Research |
Research Centre | TB Centre |
PubMed ID | 36548673 |
Elements ID | 197683 |
Official URL | http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/tropicalmed7120418 |
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Filename: Malik_etal_2022_Drug-resistant-tuberculosis-treatment-outcomes.pdf
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0
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