Praveen Deen Kumar Namala1, Praveena Basireddy2
BACKGROUND
Knowledge about the diagnosis and the treatment outcome of paediatric
tuberculosis is very much essential for functioning of tuberculosis (TB) control
programs in most countries like India. The current study was done to determine
the prevalence of paediatric tuberculosis, different modalities used for diagnosis,
drug resistance pattern, HIV-TB co-infection rate and treatment outcome.
METHODS
A 2-year retrospective study was done among all registered paediatric tuberculosis
cases aged 18 years and below, who were diagnosed during the period January
2018 to December 2019. Data was extracted from the files and was analysed.
RESULTS
The prevalence of paediatric tuberculosis was found to be 0.51 per 1000
population. The proportion of paediatric tuberculosis among total TB cases was
5.9 %. Among 14,596 total TB cases registered at District Tuberculosis Centre
(DTC) Anantapuramu, 867 (5.9 %) were paediatric TB cases, with a mean age of
12.5 ± 5.6 years. 62 % of the cases were above 12 years of age. Males (47.4 %)
and females (52.6 %) were almost equally distributed (P > 0.05). 343 (39.6 %)
cases were microbiologically confirmed TB and 524 (60.4 %) cases were clinically
diagnosed TB. Drug resistance was found in 47 (13.7 %) of the 343
microbiologically confirmed TB cases. Of the total 867 paediatric TB cases studied,
pulmonary type (56 %) was predominant than extra pulmonary type (44 %) (P <
0.05). Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) co infection was found in 24 (2.8 %)
cases. 423 cases (65.5 %) successfully completed the treatment and 173 cases
(26.8 %) were cured adding to a favourable outcome of 92.3 %. 3 (0.5 %) cases
had treatment failure, 35 (5.4 %) were defaulters and 12 (1.8 %) cases died
during the treatment, adding to a poor outcome of about 7.7 %.
CONCLUSIONS
Majority of the paediatric tuberculosis cases were diagnosed clinically rather than
microbiological confirmation. Efforts should be made to further improve the
availability and sensitivity of diagnostic methods of paediatric TB.
