Drug Resistant Tuberculosis Can Be Treated With Aggressive Therapy: Study

Harvard researchers suggests that extensively drug resistant or XDR Tuberculosis can be treated effectively with aggressive therapy.

XDR- TB is linked with high death rates and is thought to account for at least 7 percent of cases of the infection throughout the world.

According to the latest study published in the journal The Lancet, in spite of the fears that extensively drug resistant is untreatable, researchers suggests that a cure is possible with a combination of at least 5 medications.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Salmaan Keshavjee, a doctor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts said, "While early studies suggested that XDR TB is untreatable, our report indicates that while it may be difficult, it is possible to treat these patients through the use of aggressive regimens."
"A cure rate of 48.3 percent is promising in a disease that has been touted as untreatable,” Dr. Salmaan said.

Dr. Keshavjee and colleagues conducted the tests at prisons in Tomsk, Russia, where drug-resistant tuberculosis is widespread. The researchers looked at the 608 patients with MDR-TB, a strain of the disease that is resistant to the most commonly used treatments isoniazid and rifampin. 5 percent or 29 patients had XDR-TB, where the strains also don't respond to fluoroquinolone and injectable antibiotics including amikacin, kanamycin or capreomycin.

The researchers reported that they were successful in treating nearly 50 percent of the patients with XDR-TB and 66.7% of the other patients were cured.

British Lung Foundation’s spokesperson, Dr John Moore-Gillon says that the sad news is that we have extensively drug resistant tuberculosis in the first place.

He said, "The reason we have the problem is inadequate control of TB. This treatment is extremely labour and resource intensive and has to be done within extremely well structured TB programmes.”

Adding further he said, "It's a very important paper showing it's possible to deal with XDR-TB but it's very expensive."

Though, treatment for MDR-TB costs tens of thousands but when it comes to treatment for XDR-TB it's "much more than that" Dr Gillon said.

Nearly 1 in 3 people in world are infected with dormant TB bacteria and only when the bacteria become active people become ill. TB generally is found in people with weak immune systems, such as HIVdefine, older age or certain medication. It is an airborne illness which usually infects the lungs.

TB is treatable, but if not diagnosed early, it can mutate into drug-resistant strains. Nearly 2 billion people of the world's population may be infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bug that causes tuberculosis.

Every year, UK reports nearly 50 to 70 cases of multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB. XDR-TB, a strain which is resistant to 3 or more of the 6 classes of second line drugs was first found in the South Africa in the HIV/AIDS population.

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 8 million people throughout the world develop active tuberculosis and almost 2 million die every year.

XDR TB has so far been confirmed in the US, Canada and all other 45 countries world wide. In Africa it is often fueled by the AIDS virus but the researchers said few of the Russian patients were infected with HIV.