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Tuberculosis is a contagious and communicable disease while drug resistant tuberculosis is difficult to treat and requires long duration. Various strategies are focused to treat the drug resistant tuberculosis focusing lesser side effects and shorter duration of treatment. To compare treatment outcomes between short-term and long-term regimens among patients registered at a tertiary care hospital's Programmatic Management of Drug-Resistant TB (PMDT) site in Pakistan. A comparative prospective cohort study was conducted at IMBB, The University of Lahore, in collaboration with the Health Research Institute (HRI) TB Research Centre at King Edward Medical University/Mayo Hospital, Lahore. The study included a sample size of 136 patients, with 68 patients in each treatment regimen (long-term and short-term). Adult pulmonary MDR TB patients seeking treatment from the facility were included based on predefined criteria. Data was collected using a pre-designed questionnaire after obtaining ethical approval and informed consent. The rates of patients' cure, treatment completed, treatment failure and death were calculated. A total of 131 patients were successfully followed up and included in the final analysis. Of these, 66 patients were in the long-term treatment group and 65 patients were in the short-term treatment group. The cure rate was 74.8 %, with 98 patients successfully cured, and 13.8 % of patients completed their treatment successfully. In the long-term treatment group, the cure rate was 75.6 %, with a treatment failure rate of 6.2 %. In the short-term treatment group, the cure rate was 73.8 %, with a treatment failure rate of 6.1 %. The death rate was 4.5 % in the short-term treatment group and 6.2 % in the long-term treatment group. However, these differences in treatment outcomes were statistically insignificant (p-values > 0.05). The newer drugs, bedaquiline and delamanid, did not show significant improvements in the treatment of multidrug-resistant TB patients. Side effects at completion of treatment remained to be significantly lesser (p < 0.05) among short term treatment group as compared to long term treatment group. The findings suggest that short-term treatment regimens are equally effective as long-term treatment regimens, with the added benefit of presenting fewer side effects.
Munir et al. (Tue,) studied this question.