Abstract:
Background: Tuberculosis is a multipathogenetic disease, the treatment response of which is influenced by the degree of the immune disturbances. The
acute progressive evolution of this disease with extensive destructions and dissemination causes the lowest treatment results and in most of the cases is
influenced by the heterogeneous immune response.
Material and methods: Clinical and immunological data obtained before and after a standard antituberculosis treatment of 54 new pulmonary TB cases
with the failed treatment and of 34 new pulmonary successfully treated TB cases have been compared with the data of 50 healthy individuals.
Results: It has been established that despite the similar distribution of patients by gender and age in the groups and the similar prevalence of risk factors
among the patients (active smoking, alcohol consumtpion, associated diseases) the patients with treatment failure had much longer hospitalisation period
due to the persistance of clinical signs (cough, expectorations, chest pain, hemotysis, dyspnoea, asthenia, anorexia, weight loss, fever, night sweats), which
have been directly correlated with the severity of the immune disturbances. The patients with antituberculosis treatment failure have had the severe
deficiency of all lymphocytes, T subpopulations, the increased level of lymphocytes B, the increased level of all types of immune globulines, the less
evident sensibilisation to bacterial antigens (staphylococcus, streptococcus, pneumococcus) and micobacterial antigens; the intoxication indices have
increased and the preimmune resistance indices have reduced.
Conclusions: All the immune disturbances revealed can be considered as the predictors of antituberculosis treatment failure. On the contrary, the
successfully treated patients have had less evident immune disturbances of cellular, humoral and preimune resistance, and some of the indices have
returned to a normal level due to the antituberculosis treatment.
Description:
Department of Pneumophtysiology, Nicolae Testemitsanu State University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Chisinau, the Republic of Moldova