Clinical peculiarities of tuberculosis

BMC Infectious Diseases

Review

Luisa Galli¹  Maurizio de Martino¹  Elena Chiappini²  Paola Piccini²  Enrico Tortoli² 

[1] Department of Health Sciences, Meyer Children University Hospital, University of Florence, Florence, Italy;Emerging Bacterial Pathogens Unit, San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, Italy;

关键词: Tuberculosis;    Tuberculin Skin Test;    Gastric Aspirate;    Source Case;    Tuberculin Skin Test Result;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2334-14-S1-S4

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

The ongoing spread of tuberculosis (TB) in poor resource countries and the recently increasing incidence in high resource countries lead to the need of updated knowledge for clinicians, particularly for pediatricians. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview on the most important peculiarities of TB in children. Children are less contagious than adults, but the risk of progression to active disease is higher in infants and children as compared to the subsequent ages. Diagnosis of TB in children is more difficult than in adults, because few signs are associated with primary infection, interferon-gamma release assays and tuberculin skin test are less reliable in younger children, M. tuberculosis is more rarely detected in gastric aspirates than in smears in adults and radiological findings are often not specific. Treatment of latent TB is always necessary in young children, whereas it is recommended in older children, as well as in adults, only in particular conditions. Antimycobacterial drugs are generally better tolerated in children as compared to adults, but off-label use of second-line antimycobacterial drugs is increasing, because of spreading of multidrug resistant TB worldwide. Given that TB is a disease which often involves more than one member in a family, a closer collaboration is needed between pediatricians and clinicians who take care of adults.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Piccini et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.