Clinical epidemiology and treatment findings of acute tuberculosis patients in Babol City (2009–2013)

Abstract

Objective: To examine the clinical epidemiology and treatment findings of tuberculosis in Babol, Northern Iran. Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried out on medical records of tuberculosis registry pertaining to health center of Babol City, Mazandaran, Iran. The investigated variables included demographic characteristics and some clinical patterns of patients. To present the findings, the descriptive statistics such as mean (and SD) and frequency (%) was used. Analytical statistics was applied by using Chi-square test and independent samples t-test. Results: The average age of 200 patients infected with tuberculosis was 47.51 years (SD = 21.36), and 58.5% of the cases were male. In both genders, the highest number of tuberculosis patient was found in 18–38 age group. During the 5-year study period, 95% of the patients received treatment protocol 1 (including new cases with positive smear, negative smear, extra-pulmonary) and in the end of treatment given to patients, 90.5% were improved or treatment period completed. The most important clinical symptoms for referring the patients to the therapeutic centers were cough (75.1%) and fever (60.9%). Conclusions: Education and giving information to general population about the most important clinical symptoms of tuberculosis such as fever and cough might be effective in early detection and prevention of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Then treatment might be effective in decreasing the burden of the disease.

Keywords

• Tuberculosis
• Epidemiology
• Risk factors
• Clinical patterns
• Babol