From studies of new medicines and a mask used to diagnose TB, there was no shortage of interesting findings presented at the recent Union World Conference on Lung Health, held in Copenhagen, Denmark. Spotlight rounds up six studies that stood out. People do better if we dispense all TB prevention pills at once Researchers have found that dispensing all the pills in a three-month course of TB preventive therapy (TPT) at once, instead of asking people to collect pills at the clinic every few weeks, led to many more people completing the treatment course.
“Multi-month delivery of TPT is safe and person-friendly. Approaches improving the convenience of TPT should be adopted to decompress health facilities and improve TPT coverage to meet TB prevention goals,” said Dr Adrienne Shapiro, assistant professor of global health and infectious diseases at the University of Washington. One of the big talking points at this year’s conference was data on an experimental new drug called sorfequiline.
It is thought that sorfequiline could be a replacement for bedaquiline, arguably the most important TB drug developed in recent decades. This is because sorfequiline appears to be more potent than bedaquiline and because of worries over TB strains that are resistant to bedaquiline. Comorbidities are really important when people have TB The more comorbidities a person has, the higher their risk of dying if they get ill with TB.
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This risk was 19% if they had three or more comorbidities compared to 16% if they had two and 11% if they had none. The key conditions driving mortality in some people with TB are HIV and undernutrition. Undernutrition was found to be responsible for around one in five TB deaths in people under the age of 40.
Point-of-care testing leads to people starting treatment faster The details of how TB services are delivered can make a significant difference to TB outcomes. One such study, led by researchers from the University of Cape Town, explored whether it made a difference if someone had a TB test done at a mobile van or had their sputum sample collected and sent off to a lab. The study was indirectly testing whether it makes a difference if someone gets a test result right after testing versus having to wait a day or two to be contacted with a result. Tessa Mochizuki, a research scientist at the University of California, presented results from a multi-country study evaluating how accurate a portable, battery-operated testing device, called MiniDock MTB, was at diagnosing TB from sputum swabs and tongue swabs.
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