Epidemiology of childhood tuberculosis and factors associated with unsuccessful treatment outcomes in Tigray, Ethiopia: a ten-year retrospective cross sectional study

BACKGROUND: Childhood TB is an indicator of a recent transmission of the disease in a community and it is estimated to constitute 15–20% of all TB cases in many of developing countries. However, only few studies which dominated by industrial countries were engaged to assess the situation. Therefore, this study was aimed to see epidemiology of childhood TB and factors associated with poor treatment outcome in developing country. METHOD: Using retrospective cross-sectional study design; Socio-demographic and clinical data of children aged less than 15 years old, treated for all forms of TB in the past 10 years (2007–2016) was collected from randomly selected eight public hospitals of Tigray. Then, Univariate logistic regression and adjusted multivariate logistic regressions was done to identify variables which had association with unsuccessful treatment outcomes at P-value less than 0.05. RESULT: In the past 10 years, a total of 13,345 Tuberculosis cases were observed. Of these, 1086 (8.1%) cases were children aged less than 15 years old. Sixty seven (6.2%) cases were smear positive. Among those that tested for HIV, 69 (8.3%) cases were TB/HIV co-infected. Of those with treatment outcome record 746 (88.7%) were successfully treated. Factors like being female (AOR, 1.79; 95% CI, 1.07–3.00), Age 0–5 years (AOR, 3.35; 95% CI, 2.11–5.33), Unknown HIV status (AOR, 2.44; 95% CI, 1.51–3.95) and pulmonary positive case (AOR, 2.56; 95% CI, 1.13–5.77), were more likely to have unsuccessful treatment outcome than their counterparts. CONCLUSION: In Tigray 8.1% all TB cases were children age less than 15 years old. Childhood TB treatment outcome varied with sex, age and HIV status.