Outcome of Tuberculosis patients under directly observed short course treatment in western Ethiopia

Abstract

Introduction: Treatment outcome is an important indicator of tuberculosis control programs, as suggested by the World Health Organization. However, this has not been well documented in the study area. This work contributes to a better understanding this issue. Methodology: A five-year (2009-2013) retrospective cohort study was conducted between April and May 2014, in six randomly selected health institutions providing tuberculosis treatment in western Ethiopia. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to assess the association between treatment outcomes and predictor variables. Results: A total of 1,175 tuberculosis patients with a mean (standard deviation) age of 29.91 (13.99) were involved in the study. The majority of the study participants had smear-negative pulmonary tuberculosis (39.7%) and extrapulmonary tuberculosis (39.7%). Of all the study participants, 14.5% were cured, 56.3% completed treatment, 0.2% had treatment failure, 8.1% died during follow-up, 7.1% were reported as defaulters, and 13.8% were transferred out to another health institution. The overall treatment success rate was 70.8% and show progressive increases over the course of the study. The associated predictors were enrollment years, HIV co-infection, and sputum smear follow-up in the second, fifth, and seven months. Conclusions: The treatment success rate was unsatisfactory in spite of improvement seen over the study period. Thus, continued follow-up of patients, with frequent supportive supervision during the course of treatment, and provision of early detection and follow-up for HIV infection need to be strengthened to achieve an effective treatment outcome.

Treatment outcomes of childhood tuberculosis in Addis Ababa: a five-year retrospective analysis

“…This study showed an overall default rate of 0.2 % among the pediatric TB patients in the study health facilities in the last 5 years. This is much lower compared to results from previous studies which showed high default rate in Ethiopia ranging from 3.8–20 % [ 32 , 33 ].…”

Treatment outcomes of tuberculosis patients under directly observed treatment short-course at Debre Tabor General Hospital, northwest Ethiopia: nine-years retrospective study

“…In the present study, the proportion of patients with successful treatment outcomes (cured and completed) was found to be 90.9%, which is higher than the WHO target set for the Millennium Development Goal(MDG) of 85% [31][32][33] and comparable to that of the milestone target set globally for 2025 of > 90% [1,34].Comparable findings were reported by other Ethiopian studies [5,26,[35][36][37].…”

Tuberculosis treatment outcome and predictors in northern Ethiopian prisons: a five-year retrospective analysis

“…The observed treatment success rate (94%) is slightly higher than the findings from similar studies in the general population of Tigray (89.2%) [ 18 ], northeast Ethiopia (90.1%) [ 19 ] and is in the range of the target level set by End TB Strategy (a TSR of ≥90%) [ 20 ]. It also remains remarkably higher than reports from Southern (85.2%) [ 21 ], Western (70.8%) [ 22 ] and Northwest (85.6%) [ 23 ] Ethiopia. More specifically, the loss to follow-up (2.5%) and death rates (1.4%) in our study are lower than the loss to follow-up and death rates recorded in the previous studies [ 18 , 21 , 22 ] which ranged from 3.2 to 35.5% and 3.3 to 58.8%, respectively.…”