Abstract:
Tuberculosis is an airborne communicable disease caused by bacteria from mycobacterium tuberculosis complex; almost every organ in the body can be affected, but involvement of the lungs account for more than 80% of TB cases. The sputum conversion rate is the percentage of smearpositive pulmonary TB cases registered in a specified period that converted to smear negative status after the standard intensive phase of treatment.
The main objective of this study was to identify factors related with evolution of body weight and sputum smear conversion in Debre Berhan referral hospital, Amhara region, Ethiopia.
In this study, we conducted a retrospective follow-up study on 314 PTB patients enrolled from January 2015 to December 2018 at DBRH. The LMM and GLMM were used to analyze body weight and sputum conversion of PTB patients respectively. Due to the existing of missing values in the dataset, we conducted a multiple imputation mothed to minimize a potential Problems that occurs with missing data and attrition.
The results of LMM showed that the predictors such as age, height, sex, smoking status, BMI, dose of anti TB drugs, HIV status and treatment outcomes were found to be significantly related with change in body weight of patients. The GLMM result also indicated that predictors variables such as sex, height, age, dose of anti-TB drug, baseline body weight, HIV status, smoking status and treatment outcomes were found to be statistically related with conversion of sputum status of patients with PTB.
