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Evidence-based Tuberculosis Diagnosis

25 Jul 2008

Paul Chinnock

Source: PLoS Medicine (see original article)

Citation: Pai M, Ramsay A, O'Brien R (2008) Evidence-Based Tuberculosis Diagnosis. PLoS Med 5(7): e156

2008 Pai et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Improving the effectiveness of diagnosis is crucial to the global efforts to control tuberculosis (TB). New diagnostic tools have become available but the evidence as to their effectiveness has been limited. Fortunately there have more recently been a number of systematic reviews.

Members of the Stop TB Partnership’s Working Group on New Diagnostics have written an article for PLoS Medicine’s Research in Translation series that discusses the evidence that has now become available on the effectiveness of the new tests. Some of them have performed well in studies; for others the results have been disappointing. Five of the published systematic reviews are highlighted in the review as being key sources of evidence.

As the authors point out, the world spends an estimated US$1 billion per year on diagnostics for TB and it is important to ensure that such expenditure should be backed by strong evidence.