Treatment Outcomes of Short Course Regimens for Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis patients in Peshawar

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) still remain a global public health problem. TB is deadly disease caused by a bacterium named Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB). Now a day TB is resurgence in the form of drug resistant TB (DR-TB). In order to improve adherence to anti-TB treatment, the World Health Organization (WHO) promotes the use of directly observed therapy (DOT), in which patients undertake medications under the direct observation of a health care provider. Objectives: The present study was conducted with the aim to find out treatment outcome of 11 months STR treatment for MDR-TB patients at PMDT LRH. Results: This study was conducted from July 2017 to March 2020. In this study only those patients were enrolled who were eligible for newly assigned 11 months short treatment of MDR-TB. All those patients who were achieved final outcomes at time of this final draft were included in this study. The numbers of such patients were 109. Mean age of study cases was 19.544 with standard deviation ±15.947. Majority of study cases (56.0%) were females. For study purpose, study cases were divided into four different groups, of which most of the cases belonged to the age group form 45 years to 64 years of age. About 77.1% of these cases achieved successful treatment outcome and remaining 22.9% of study cases achieved unsuccessful treatment outcome. Conclusion: The findings of the current study have several clear implications for TB control efforts. In light of these findings, it could be concluded that to reduce DR-TB transmission in the community, improvement of treatment outcomes, via ensuring adherence, paying special attention to poor and patient having very far residency form the treatment site. Treatment adherence made better by offering a short, highly effective treatment regimen for MDR-TB because of the main challenge in achieving the successful treatment outcome is the large number of pills that patients must ingest every day. This study also concluded that with the experience and dedicated team it is very easy to achieve best success rate for any type of treatment.