Aggressive drug treatment may cure drug-resistant TB
August 7th, 2008 - 2:00 pm ICT by ANIWashington, Aug 7 (ANI): Drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) can be effectively treated with aggressive drug treatment, say researchers.
A study from Peru, between 1999 and 2002, demonstrated that more than 60 percent of XDR-TB patients not co-infected with HIV were cured after a personalized treatment.
Previous studied led by an international team of researchers had already shown that aggressive, outpatient treatment could cure multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), which is resistant to two first-line anti-TB drugs.
In the present study, Peru researchers used a similar protocol for XDR-TB caused by bacteria that are resistant not only to the same first-line anti-TB drugs, but also to the two most important second-line drug classes.
A total of 810 patients with tuberculosis were referred for free individualized drug treatment and additional services as needed, including surgery, adverse-event management, and nutritional and psychological support.
Sputum culture and drug-susceptibility testing results, performed at the Massachusetts State Laboratory Institute in Boston, were available for 651 patients.
Based on susceptibility results for 12 anti-TB drugs, clinicians developed regimens that included five or more drugs to which the infecting strains were likely to respond.
Among the study participants, forty-eight patients had XDR-TB, 603 had MDR-TB and none of the XDR-TB patients were co-infected with the HIV virus.
The researchers found that 60.4 percent in the XDR-TB group and 66.3 percent in MDR-TB group were cured with the treatment.
However, the outcomes among XDR-TB patients were better than most reported from hospital settings in Europe, the U.S., and Korea.
“It’’s essential that the world know that XDR-TB is not a death sentence,” says lead author Carole Mitnick, instructor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS).
Patients with XDR-TB and other drug-resistant forms of the disease are often confined to hospitals for treatments but the new study showed that this treatment would not require hospitalisation.
“As or even more importantly, our study shows that effective treatment does not require hospitalisation or indefinite confinement of patients,” Mitnick added.
The paper appears in The New England Journal of Medicine. (ANI)
- Central team to probe drug resistant TB cases in Mumbai - Jan 17, 2012
- 'Time to scale up work on TB control' - Jan 24, 2012
- TB causing half million annual deaths in South-East Asia: WHO - Mar 22, 2012
- Berlin 2010: TB, HIV and Lung Health: From research and innovation to solutions - Nov 02, 2010
- Involving TB patients in TB programmes will help - Mar 23, 2009
- Addressing poverty in TB control: The Thailand experience - Nov 04, 2010
- Extensively drug-resistant TB deadlier than previously thought - Nov 06, 2008
- Drug resistent TB deadlier, more common than suspected - Nov 06, 2008
- WHO calls for dealing with multi-drug resistant microbes - Apr 07, 2011
- 36 mln people with TB cured, eight mln lives saved since 1995 - Dec 09, 2009
- Gonorrhea cure gets tough as bug grows drug resistant - Nov 08, 2011
- Standard re-treatment regimen for TB 'failing' in developing world - Mar 16, 2011
- Government to rope in chemists to fight TB (March 24 is World Tuberculosis Day) - Mar 24, 2012
- China reports 900,000 TB cases in 2011 - Mar 21, 2012
- 36 million people with TB cured: New WHO Data released - Dec 14, 2009
Tags: drug resistant tb, drug resistant tuberculosis, drug susceptibility, harvard medical school, hiv virus, hospital settings, massachusetts state, mitnick, multi drug resistant tuberculosis, outpatient treatment, psychological support, social medicine, state laboratory institute, study participants, susceptibility testing, tb 603, tb drugs, tb patients, tuberculosis xdr, xdr tb