Microbiology & Infectious Diseases

Biography

Biography: Anil Chandra Phukan

Abstract

 North East India is the north eastern region of the country comprising of eight states with 4500 km of international boundary with China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan having >40 million population and 220 ethnic groups. North Eastern Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Sciences (NEIGRIHMS), Shillong is the Post Graduate medical and health institute catering tertiary health care services to the patients of the entire region. North East India is bearing a considerable burden of tuberculosis with increasing cases of extra pulmonary tuberculosis where musculoskeletal tuberculosis is found to be a diagnostic dilemma to the treating clinicians. The study was carried out for understanding the prevalence of musculoskeletal tuberculosis and its clinic-bacterial profile among the patients attending the NEIGRIHMS hospital during 2015-2016 using both conventional and molecular diagnostic tools. Ultrasound guided pus aspiration, synovial fluid, bone biopsy and pus swabs from 52 suspected musculoskeletal tuberculosis patients were collected and subjected for laboratory detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection employing morphological, cultural and molecular identifications. The study revealed 46.2% musculoskeletal tuberculosis with majority in the age group of 21-30 years (28.9%). Hip and knee joints were found to affected more (23.1% each) followed by lumber spines (19.2%). Ultra sound guided sample collection showed significantly better detection (71%) than the pus swabs. Molecular diagnosis using polymerase chain reaction assay is proved to be superior (46.2%) to culture (25%) and microscopy (1.92%) in terms of diagnostic accuracy, treatment initiation and avoidance of complications in better management of such paucibacillary tuberculosis.