Tuberculosis: clinical manifestations and outcomes

A total of 290 HIV/AIDS patients were recruited into this retrospective study, which was carried out at the National Tuberculosis Center (NTBC), Kuala Lumpur. The age range was 18 to 75 years with a mean age of 36.10 (SD +/- 7.44) years. Males outnumbered females by a ratio of 31:1. In this study, the majority of patients were male (96.9%), Malay (47.2%), single (66.9%), unemployed (81%), and smoked (61.4%). The main risk marker identified was injecting drug use (74.5%). The most common clinical manifestations were cough, fever, sputum, lymphadenopathy, and chest infiltrations. More than half of the patients (85.9%) were diagnosed with localized tuberculosis (pulmonary) and the others (14.1%) had extra-pulmonary or disseminated tuberculosis. At the time of this study, the majority of the patients (16.9%) had CD4 cell counts of less than 200 cell/mm3, with a median of 221 cell/mm3. Clinical outcomes demonstrated that among those who survived, 11.0% and 20.7% of the patients had completed treatment either > or = 6 or > or = 9 months, respectively, whereas 54.8% of patients were lost to follow-up, including 0.7% for MDR-TB. Diagnostic criteria for tuberculosis in this study were mainly clinical symptoms/signs and chest x-ray findings (31.0%).