ArticleAmerican journal of respiratory and critical care medicine2012
Variability of infectious aerosols produced during coughing by patients with pulmonary tuberculosis.
Article in American journal of respiratory and critical care medicine, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 103 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
103 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Dynamics of sputum conversion during effective tuberculosis treatment: A systematic review and meta-analysis.PLoS medicine · 2021Pooled it
- Nontuberculous mycobacteria in gastrostomy fed patients with cystic fibrosis.Scientific reports · 2017Trial
- A Whole-blood Transcriptional Signature Associated With Obstructive Post-tuberculosis Lung Disease.Open forum infectious diseases · 2026Article
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- Desiccation promotes DNA damage and rifampin resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Optimal Scale of Greenspace Exposure for Pulmonary Tuberculosis Treatment Success: Multi-scale Associations and Interactions with Air Pollutants.Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine · 2026Article
- The study of immunological markers in tuberculosis across animal models and its translation to human research.Lab animal · 2026Review
- Predictors of culture status in patients with persistent smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis at two months of treatment.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Airflow Determines Natural Airborne Transmission of Tuberculosis in a Guinea Pig Model.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Experimental system enables studies ofmBio · 2025Article
- Detection of AerosolizedOpen forum infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Overview of the Epidemiology, Diagnosis, and Clinical Care Considerations for People Living with and at Risk for Tuberculosis in the United States.The Nursing clinics of North America · 2025Review
- Dynamic of infectious aerosols generated by cough from patients with pulmonary tuberculosis.Journal of aerosol science · 2025Article
- Differentially culturableJournal of medical microbiology · 2025Article
- Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra performance on bronchial specimens in diagnosing pulmonary tuberculosis in Vancouver, Canada.Journal of medical microbiology · 2025Article
- Candidate transmission survival genome ofProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Pulmonary Tuberculosis Infectiousness of Persons Identified Through Active and Passive Case-finding in a High-burden Setting.Open forum infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Assessing Infectiousness and the Impact of Effective Treatment to Guide Isolation Recommendations for People With Pulmonary Tuberculosis.The Journal of infectious diseases · 2025Review
- Association of Mycobacterium tuberculosis aerosolization and HIV coinfection in the index case with T cell responses in household contacts.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Rapid quantitative PCR on tongue swabs for pulmonary tuberculosis in adults: a prospective multicentre study.The European respiratory journal · 2025Article
43 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
16 authors.
Funding
Abstract
rationaleMycobacterium tuberculosis is transmitted by infectious aerosols, but assessing infectiousness currently relies on sputum microscopy that does not accurately predict the variability in transmission.
objectivesTo evaluate the feasibility of collecting cough aerosols and the risk factors for infectious aerosol production from patients with pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in a resource-limited setting.
methodsWe enrolled subjects with suspected TB in Kampala, Uganda and collected clinical, radiographic, and microbiological data in addition to cough aerosol cultures. A subset of 38 subjects was studied on 2 or 3 consecutive days to assess reproducibility. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN
resultsM. tuberculosis was cultured from cough aerosols of 28 of 101 (27.7%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 19.9-37.1%) subjects with culture-confirmed TB, with a median 16 aerosol cfu (range, 1-701) in 10 minutes of coughing. Nearly all (96.4%) cultivable particles were 0.65 to 4.7 μm in size. Positive aerosol cultures were associated with higher Karnofsky performance scores (P = 0.016), higher sputum acid-fast bacilli smear microscopy grades (P = 0.007), lower days to positive in liquid culture (P = 0.004), stronger cough (P = 0.016), and fewer days on TB treatment (P = 0.047). In multivariable analyses, cough aerosol cultures were associated with a salivary/mucosalivary (compared with purulent/mucopurulent) appearance of sputum (odds ratio, 4.42; 95% CI, 1.23-21.43) and low days to positive (per 1-d decrease; odds ratio, 1.17; 95% CI, 1.07-1.33). The within-test (kappa, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.68-0.94) and interday test (kappa, 0.62; 95% CI, 0.43-0.82) reproducibility were high.
conclusionsA minority of patients with TB (28%) produced culturable cough aerosols. Collection of cough aerosol cultures is feasible and reproducible in a resource-limited setting.
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