Abstract:
Abstract
Back ground: The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Tuberculosis a global health
emergency in 1993 as it remains a major cause of mortality in developing countries. The World
Health Organization's Directly Observed Treatment Short course (DOTs) strategy achieve 87%
success rate in the areas where it is implemented, usually with five drugs, lasts for 6months. Till
1998 Sudan was classified as one of the slowly moving countries in implementation of the DOTS
strategy and making no progress against tuberculosis.
Objective: A prospective comparative, randomized clinical trial, hospital based study carried out at
Kosti Teaching Hospital using directly observed treatment short course (DOTS), to assess the
adverse drug reactions of intermittent chemotherapy compared to the currently adopted short course
therapy.
Methodology: Patients with smear positive new cases of tuberculosis were enrolled and
randomized in to two groups, intermittent treatment group (A) and daily regimen group (B) .The
raw data were introduced into SPSS program, the data comparison was carried out by Pearson Chi
square and pair independent sample student T-test. The level of significance (P<0.05).
Results: A total of 275 were studied, significant initial (pre-interventional) elevated means of
aspartate aminotransferase (AST) was detected in the two groups and significantly in the
intermittent regimen after two and four months, but the decrease was significant only after two
months in the daily group.
Conclusion: Liver injury following anti-tuberculous treatment was minimal and the adverse drug
reactions were tolerable concerning the majority of the patients completing the course of the
treatment.
