Situation of the tuberculosis-diabetes comorbidity in adults in Peru: 2016-2018

To describe the characteristics of adult patients with tuberculosis (TB) and diabetes mellitus (DM) in Peru, and to explore the association of DM and mortality in people with TB.

We carried out a secondary analysis of the database of the Management Information System of Tuberculosis of the Tuberculosis Prevention and Control Directorate of the Ministry of Health of Peru. Adult patients who started treatment with the scheme for drug-sensitive TB in 2016, 2017 and 2018 were included. We carried out a descriptive analysis of patients with TB and DM, and an exploratory analysis to assess the association of DM with mortality using a Poisson regression to determine the relative risk (RR).

We registered 67,524 adults with drug-sensitive TB, of which 6,529 (9.7%) people were reported as having TB and DM; and 4,048 (6.0%) had HIV infection. Of the patients reported with TB and DM, most were men (60.2%) with a median age of 53 years. Regarding mortality, people with TB and DM had a higher frequency of death compared to those with TB without DM (7.2% vs 5.4%). In the exploratory analysis of factors associated with mortality, DM had a crude RR of 1.32 (95% CI: 1.20-1.50); however, this association varied in the adjusted model with a RR of 0.93 (95% CI: 0.84-1.04).

DM is the most frequent comorbidity in patients with TB in Peru, although no association with higher mortality was found.