Abstract
Introduction: TNFα inhibitors play an important role as therapeutic agents for certain chronic inflammatory diseases, but this treatment influences the subject's immune status and can lead to opportunistic infections, including the TB.
Objective: Assessment of the sensitivity of the QuantiFERON-TB GOLD (QFT) method versus the tuberculin skin test (TST) in detecting TB infection on a group of patients with rheumatoid arthritis previously treated with Infliximab.
Methodology: Selection of a group of 52 rheumatoid arthritis patients treated before with TNFα inhibitors, diagnosed with pulmonary or extra pulmonary tuberculosis. On these 52 subjects TST and QFT were performed, observing the outcome, particularly in the TB confirmed cases (18-bk cultures, 5 histopathologically confirmed cases).
Results: From the processed data we observed that in the group of 23 patients with confirmed tuberculosis infection, 14 have had TST positive results (60.87%) and 15 QFT positive results (65.22%) and from those 29 unconfirmed, 16 have had positive results on TST (55.17%) and 14 were QFT positive (48.27%).
Conclusions: QFT is an important method of TB infection diagnosis, but in patients undergoing chronic treatment with TNFα inhibitors it doesn't show a greater sensitivity than TST.
- © 2011 ERS
