ArticleFrontiers in medicine2022
Systematic assessment of clinical and bacteriological markers for tuberculosis reveals discordance and inaccuracy of symptom-based diagnosis for treatment response monitoring.
Article in Frontiers in medicine, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Diagnostic Accuracy of Sonographic Signs of Extrapulmonary Tuberculosis and Treatment Response Monitoring in HIV-Positive and -Negative Populations.The ultrasound journal · 2026Article
- A high centrifugal force-enhanced Ziehl-Neelsen method for improved detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.PloS one · 2026Article
- Beyond culturability: VBNC-like and differentially culturableFrontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Review
- Stool-Based Molecular Tuberculosis Treatment Monitoring: A Faster Means for Detecting Persistent Mycobacteria Compared to Phenotypic Culture.Open forum infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Article
- Developing biomarker assays to accelerate tuberculosis drug development: defining target product profiles.The Lancet. Microbe · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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Abstract
Background: Clinical symptoms are the benchmark of tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis and monitoring of treatment response but are not clear how they relate to TB bacteriology, particularly the novel tuberculosis-molecular bacterial load assay (TB-MBLA). Methods: Presumptive cases were bacteriologically confirmed for TB and assessed for symptoms and bacteriological resolution using smear microscopy (SM), culture, and TB-MBLA over 6-month treatment course. Kaplan-Meier and Kappa statistics were used to test the relationship between symptoms and bacteriological positivity. Results: A cohort of 46 bacteriologically confirmed TB cases were analyzed for treatment response over a 6-month treatment course. Pre-treatment symptoms and bacteriological positivity concurred in over 70% of the cases. This agreement was lost in over 50% of cases whose chest pain, night sweat, and loss of appetite had resolved by week 2 of treatment. Cough resolved at a 3.2% rate weekly and was 0.3% slower than the combined bacteriological (average of MGIT and TB-MBLA positivity) resolution rate, 3.5% per week. A decrease in TB-MBLA positivity reflected a fall in bacillary load, 5.7 ± 1.3- at baseline to 0.30 ± 1.0- log Conclusion: The probability of clinical symptoms reflecting bacteriological positivity weakens as the patient progresses on anti-TB therapy, making the symptom-based diagnosis a less reliable marker of treatment response.
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