Screening for Pulmonary Tuberculosis among Elderly Patients in Sohag Chest Hospital

Abstract

uberculosis is emerging as a significant health problem in the elderly. The symptoms are often non-specific and may be attributed to changes related to age. This often leads to a delayed diagnosis and more advanced disease at presentation. The presence of other underlying diseases may also alter the clinical picture. . Tuberculin skin testing (TST) has a more limited role to play in the diagnosis of active tuberculosis than it does in identifying patients with latent tuberculosis infection, and this is particularly true in older individuals. In tuberculosis patients in general, TST can be negative about 20% of the time in the setting of active disease, and the skin test will be negative even more often in older patients. Hence our study was done on 120 patients above 65 years old were selected randomly whether inpatient or following the out patient clinic at Sohag Chest Hospital to screen pulmonary tuberculosis among them throught full history taking, examination by mantoux skin test and chest xray and processing for positive reactors by sputum analysis and ESR and finding the relation between positive tuberculin reactors and many parameters like sex, occupation, smoking, co-morbid conditions, chest x-ray findind and ESR results