Prevalence of MDR-TB Based on Demographic Factors Among Patients Attending Nauth and St Patrick’s Hospital Mile 4 Abakaliki in Southeast Nigeria

This study was designed to determine the prevalence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) among pulmonary tuberculosis patients attending NnamdiAzikiwe University Teaching Hospital (NAUTH) Nnewi and St Patrick’s Hospital Mile 4 Abakaliki demographically. Patients with persistent cough for over two weeks were screened by Ziehl-Neelsen ZN technique for the presence of acid fast bacilli (AFB) in their sputum and a total of 103 patients with AFB positive sputum samples were recruited. The positive sputum samples were subjected to Xpert MTB/RIF assay (GeneXpert®, Cepheid USA) and culture on Lowestein Jensen medium for 42 days at 37°C. Drug susceptibility testing was done on the isolates using the nitrate reduction assay (NRA). Eighty-three 83 (80.6%) of the isolates were obtained from culture after suspected colonies were subjected to morphological, biochemical, and immunological tests and out of the 83 (80.6%) samples analysed by Xpert MTB/RIF assay 45 (67.2%) were rifampicin resistant. Age group 26-35 years showed the highest proportion of positive culture results (33.7%) followed by age group 18-25 (28.8%) years. Demographically, age group 26-35 years had a high prevalence rate of MDR-TB (50.0%) and female gender also showed high prevalence rate of MDR-RB (48.5%). Strikingly, educational status was significantly associated with MDR-TB (P=.020). St Patrick’s hospital had a high prevalence rate of MDR-TB (46.94%) when compared with NAUTH (38.9%) and these indicates that there is high prevalence of MDR-TB among patients with pulmonary TB in these sites. The demographic results of this study calls for urgent and serious intervention as MDR-TB prevalence is increasing even in the face of intense national TB control program.