ArticleBMC medicine2025
Sensitive diagnosis of paucibacillary tuberculosis with targeted next-generation sequencing: a molecular diagnostic study.
Article in BMC medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Overlap Between Crohn's Disease and Intestinal Tuberculosis: A Never-Ending Story.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2026Review
- Nanopore-targeted sequencing improves the diagnosis and treatment of patients with infectious ascites.Journal of translational medicine · 2026Article
- Comparison of the diagnostic value of targeted next-generation sequencing, metagenomic next-generation sequencing, and Xpert MTB/RIF in adult pulmonary tuberculosis.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Tuberculosis Diagnostic Methods: Clinical Applicability, Implementation Challenges, and Integrated Testing Strategies.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Clinical utility of targeted next-generation sequencing for rapid detection, species differentiation, drug resistance profiling, and prognostic evaluation inFrontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Article
- Analysis of the diagnostic efficacy of targeted next-generation sequencing for tuberculosis in patients with HIV.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Article
- Hierarchical integration of mNGS, PCR, and other conventional methods for precision TB diagnostics.Microbiology spectrum · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
backgroundTargeted next-generation sequencing (tNGS) enables high-performance tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis and drug resistance prediction directly from clinical samples. However, its applicability to paucibacillary TB, including pediatric TB and extrapulmonary TB (EPTB), has been less explored. We aimed to evaluate the performance of tNGS in these challenging TB presentations.
methodsWe prospectively and consecutively enrolled children (< 18 years) with suspected TB and adults with suspected EPTB. All participants underwent a comprehensive clinical examination, laboratory tests, and tNGS analysis. The diagnostic performance of tNGS was evaluated against composite reference standards, while resistance prediction capabilities were assessed with GeneXpert MTB/RIF and phenotypic drug susceptibility testing.
resultsA total of 85 children and 228 adults were enrolled. In children, tNGS showed a sensitivity of 74% (95% CI, 61-84%) and a specificity of 97% (95% CI, 84-100%) for microbiologically and clinically confirmed TB, whereas in adults with microbiologically and clinically confirmed EPTB, it demonstrated 77% sensitivity (95% CI, 68-83%) and 98% specificity (95% CI, 94-100%). For drug resistance prediction, tNGS exhibited variable sensitivity, peaking at 88% for rifampicin (95% CI, 47-100%) and bottoming out at 38% for streptomycin (95% CI, 9-76%), alongside a consistently acceptable specificity ranging from 89% (95% CI, 76-96%) to 100% (95% CI, 93-100%).
conclusionstNGS is a potentially promising test that enables rapid and sensitive diagnosis of TB in children and individuals with extrapulmonary TB. However, the variability in its accuracy for predicting drug resistance in these populations needs to be validated and addressed before its clinical application.
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