Extract
Curing tuberculosis (TB) entails adhering to a multidrug regimen for ≥6 months [1]. Failure to take the medications as prescribed can lead to treatment failure, drug resistance and further spread of TB, resulting in morbidity and death for the patient and a threat to public health. Treatment failure is the most important cause of drug-resistant TB, which is much more long, expensive and toxic to treat, and the outcomes of which are still unsatisfactory [2–4]. The public health consequences of nonadherence to TB treatment led to directly observed therapy (DOT) becoming the universal standard of care [5–8]. While DOT is a best practice model for TB treatment, it is labour intensive and can itself be a barrier to effective therapy because of its inconvenience for patients. The expense may be prohibitive for cash-strapped public healthcare systems [9].
Abstract
A video-based approach is a novel, patient-oriented strategy for TB treatment http://ow.ly/JDQCi
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Golnaz Ebrahimi (University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA) and Marybeth Allen (University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA) for their editorial assistance.
Footnotes
Conflict of interest: Disclosures can be found alongside the online version of this article at erj.ersjournals.com
Support Statement: Mehdi Mirsaeidi is supported by US National Institutes of Health grant 5 T32 HL 82547-7. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Funding information for this article has been deposited with FundRef.
- Received January 21, 2015.
- Accepted February 21, 2015.
- Copyright ©ERS 2015