Rizwan Iqbal, Muhammad Kashif Munir, Sana Rehman, Saqib Saeed.
Treatment Strategies in Defaulters among MDR TB patients.
J Pak Society Int Med Jan ;2(1):19-23.

Background: Tuberculosis is a chronic disease and the most common cause of death while drug resistance in TB is a serious health issue throughout the world. Individuals with MDR TB treatment defaulters are focused with least priority due to number of administrative, low socioeconomic and resource issues. Objective: To follow and locate, MDR TB treatment defaulters with an intention to bring them back on treatment. Methods: This exploratory observational study was undertaken by Pakistan Health Research Council, TB Research Centre from July 2017 to April 2018 in collaboration with Department of Pulmonology, King Edward Medical University/Mayo Hospital, Lahore. Data was collected in the form of demographic characteristics like name, age, gender and those with previous history of treatment, contact, co-morbidities, smoking and socio economic status were noted. The data was entered and analysed by using IBM SPSS. Results: A total of 41 patients were successfully followed of which 20 (48.8%) were males and 21 (51.2%) were females with male to female ratio of 1:1.05. Mean age of male patients was 35.85+-12.60 years and female patients remained 39.8+-15.04 years with an overall mean age of 37.87+-13.88. A total of 11 (26.8%) patients were re-enrolled 3 (7.3%) had started their treatment from private clinics while same number of patients died after re-enrolment in hospital. High number of 15 (36.6%) patients did not re-enrolled as they were not willing to take further medicine. Conclusion: Proper counselling and follow up of drug resistant MDR TB defaulters can bring them back to reenrol for treatment. Most common reason of the patients to default from treatment was parenteral therapy.

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