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Methodology and Results of the study

Posted by sarman_singh on 09 Mar 2013 at 07:53 GMT

It is surprising that even if all 611 patients were MDR suspects how come that all 483 isolates were bacteriologically MDR as well and no pan-sensitive? In real life such results are never observed. We have been doing similar studies and in all clinically suspected MDR patients not more than 75% are actually MDR strains, and several of these 75% will be resistant to one or more drug not fulfilling the criteria MDR. Hence we expect that author will provide information that how many were sensitive isolates or in other words how many total isolations were made from 611 patients.

Thanks

Prof. Sarman Singh

No competing interests declared.

RE: Methodology and Results of the study

drurvashi replied to sarman_singh on 14 Mar 2013 at 01:57 GMT

The study was designed with the specific objective to look for XDR-TB among MDR-TB patients and study the demographic characters. Special effort was made to enroll MDR-TB patients from amongst patients with high clinical suspicion. We identified 483 of 611 patients enrolled as MDR-TB (79%).

Drug susceptibility testing was performed only for Rifampicin and Isoniazid in order to identify MDR-TB isolates. Strains that were sensitive to either RIF/INH or both drugs were excluded from further workup (n=128).

No competing interests declared.