Clinical epidemiology and treatment findings of acute tuberculosis patients in Babol City (2009–2013)

Abstract

A B S T R A C TObjective: To examine the clinical epidemiology and treatment findings of tuberculosis in Babol, Northern Iran. Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried out on medical records of tuberculosis registry pertaining to health center of Babol City, Mazandaran, Iran. The investigated variables included demographic characteristics and some clinical patterns of patients. To present the findings, the descriptive statistics such as mean (and SD) and frequency (%) was used. Analytical statistics was applied by using Chi-square test and independent samples t-test. Results: The average age of 200 patients infected with tuberculosis was 47.51 years (SD = 21.36), and 58.5% of the cases were male. In both genders, the highest number of tuberculosis patient was found in 18-38 age group. During the 5-year study period, 95% of the patients received treatment protocol 1 (including new cases with positive smear, negative smear, extra-pulmonary) and in the end of treatment given to patients, 90.5% were improved or treatment period completed. The most important clinical symptoms for referring the patients to the therapeutic centers were cough (75.1%) and fever (60.9%).Conclusions: Education and giving information to general population about the most important clinical symptoms of tuberculosis such as fever and cough might be effective in early detection and prevention of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Then treatment might be effective in decreasing the burden of the disease.

The frequency of risk factors for pulmonary tuberculosis in tuberculosis patients in Babol, Northern Iran, during 2008-2015

“…the ratio of urban and rural patients was almost identical, however, men suffered from tuberculosis 1.5 times more than women. In this study, only three patients had HIV [20]. In another study in Tehran, while the ratio of men and women was similar, in this study, the proportion of urban patients was four times more than rural patients [21].…”

Perceived stigma and depression in initially diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis patients

“…'s () and Nikbakht et al. 's () studies averaged in age between 31.7–47.5 years. Overall, the results indicated that gender, age, education, income and employment are correlated with TB, despite differences in geographic location or culture.…”

“…Tuberculosis is a chronic infectious disease, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. With regular medication, 90%-95% of patients can be fully cured in 6-9 months (Nikbakht et al, 2016;Wu, Lu, Chen, Pan, & Feng, 2011). TB incidence in the USA remained at approximately 3.0 cases per 100,000 persons during -2015(Salinas et al, 2016.…”

Tuberculosis in Abadan, Iran (2012 - 2016) : An Epidemiological Study

“…Noeske et al also reported that most of the TB patients belonged to the age group of 25-34 years in Cameroon (5). In a study in Hamedan province, Khazaei et al (6) reported that the largest TB cases occur in the age group over 60 years old, which is more consistent with the TB pattern of the whole country (7). It seems that the high number of affected people in the age group of 20-39 years old is due to the high population of this age group and the high prevalence of addiction among them.…”