Research on drug-induced liver injury in association with co-infections and anti-tuberculosis drugs

This study uses data mining techniques to find out the risk factors for the tuberculosis (TB) patients with drug-induced liver injury (DILI). The Taiwan National Health Insurance Database is used for collection of domestic TB cases during 2004-2011 to study these TB patients and their drug prescribing patterns in order to build a model to predict the risk of drug-drug interaction between hepatitis B and C, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and TB. The results out of the total 188,032 TB patients have shown that 77,574 have taken anti-TB drugs. Afterwards, DILI occurred in 0.7% of the cases. Besides, for those DILI patients associated with TB and hepatitis B or C, this study reveals that DILI is associated with the use of ethambutol and rifampin. It is suggested that TB patients associated with hepatitis C should pay attention to their uses of rifampicin, and TB patients (especially males) associated with hepatitis B should pay attention to the ethambutol's impact on DILI. Moreover, our results also showed that having both AIDS and TB shows no significant effect on DILI.