A Cross-Sectional Study of Tuberculosis Patients in Dhemaji Hospital, Assam, India

Abstract

Aims: Tuberculosis (TB) is a major infectious disease among worldwide, affects the lungs. It also may be transmitted to other parts of the body, including the bones, meninges, kidneys and lymph nodes. For control of tuberculosis, it is necessary to find the cases as early as possible, and to ensure that the tuberculosis patients complete their treatment and get cured.

Methods: Being a register-based cross-sectional study, we analyzed the records of 800 tuberculosis patients at Dhemaji Civil Hospital from the TB register booklets, Jan 2017 to Dec. 2018. To test the prevalence of pulmonary Tuberculosis between male and female, Logistic regression was used to estimate the odds ratio for categorizing TB and living area of patients.

Results: From the total of 800 number of registered Tuberculosis patients from which 310 samples are randomly drawn for our sample, we found 217 males and 93 females respectively. Here we have considered pulmonary and extra pulmonary cases and have observed that male pulmonary is 81% and extra pulmonary is 19% whereas among the female74% of the cases are pulmonary and 26% are extra pulmonary respectively. Though male pulmonary is higher than female, there is no significant difference between male pulmonary and female pulmonary. Again as we have found that the patients odds ratio between category of tuberculosis and living area of patients is 2.54, (Z > Z (0.05)) so we reject null hypothesis. The odds ratio shows that those tuberculosis patients in rural area are 27 times more likely to be pulmonary tuberculosis than those of urban areas and the difference is also found to be statistically significant.