ISSN: 0973-7510

E-ISSN: 2581-690X

Research Article | Open Access
Druti Hazra, Vishnu Prasad Shenoy* and Kiran Chawla
Department of Microbiology, Kasturba Medical College Manipal, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal – 576 104, India.
J Pure Appl Microbiol, 2019, 13 (2): 1251-1256 | Article Number: 5572
Received: 01/04/2019 | Accepted: 20/05/2019 | Published: 28/06/2019
Abstract

Sputum microscopy is the primary diagnostic tool for screening pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) suspects in TB prevalent countries. Our study had evaluated the ‘front loading’ or ‘same day’ sputum microscopy feasibility to screen clinically suspected PTB cases, in comparison to standard method of smear microscopy. In this hospital based cross-sectional study, three sputum specimens i.e., two consecutive spot samples collected in one hour interval on the first day of visit and a single sputum sample was collected on the next day early morning from 312 randomly selected adults suspected for PTB. Sputum samples were cultured on Lowenstein-Jensen (LJ) medium and stained by auramine O method and examined under LED-fluorescence microscopy. Out of 312 presumptive PTB patients, 43 (13.8%) were smear-positive by front loading method and 46 (14.7%) by standard method respectively. Considering LJ media culture as the gold standard test, the sensitivity was 83.7% and 89.8% respectively for front loading and the standard sputum microscopy and specificity was 99.2% by both methods. The statistical difference was insignificant between two methods of sputum microscopy (p-value > 0.05 by McNemar’s test). In health care settings of high burden countries same day sputum microscopy could be an acceptable method to screen the suspects of pulmonary tuberculosis and complete the diagnosis procedure on the first day of visit, which will decrease patients’ drop-out from the diagnostic procedure and initiate treatments as soon as possible.

Keywords

Front-loading, LED fluorescence microscopy, pulmonary tuberculosis, sputum smear, diagnosis, same day.

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© The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.