Effect of Intensity of Sputum Smear Positive in Pulmonary Tuberculosis Patients at the Beginning of Treatment on Treatment Outcome

Tuberculosis is an acute or chronic necrotizing infection which involves various organs of the body especially the lungs. Identifying the determinants of outcome in these patients is important; therefore, this study was conducted to study the relationship between the degree of sputum smear -positive patients on treatment outcome.
This study was done on 465 pulmonary tuberculosis patients with smear-positive during the years of 2005 to 2013 and they were identified in Hamadan province. By using descriptive statistics the distribution of status of sputum positive at the beginning of treatment was determined. Chi-square test was used to assess the relationship between sputum smear status of patients and treatment outcome. Data were analyzed using Stata vol 12.
Findings: As total of 465 patients, 51.61% were male and 59.14% of them were living in urban areas. 41.94 % of patients with sputum smear 3 were identified at the beginning of treatment. 10.32 % of patients eventually died and at 4.3 % of them had treatment failure. Relation between basil level at the beginning of treatment with a therapeutic relationship was relatively significant (P = 0.06).
Discussion & There is relation between level of basil at beginning of treatment and treatment outcome. So that the improvement rate in low- Basil in sputum smear is higher and on the other hand death and treatment failure is higher in high basil in sputum smear patients.