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Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Treatment Outcomes among Children and Adolescents in Karachi, Pakistan
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 pro...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9788275/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36548673 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/tropicalmed7120418 |
Sumario: | 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. |
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