An Observational Study on Clinical Profiles of Tuberculous Pleural Effusion Patients in A Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital, Dhanmondi, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract

Background: Mycobacterium tuberculosis has infected around 1.7 billion people around the world so far and has been categorized as one of the top 10 causes of mortality globally. The rate of infection is increasing every year mainly 30 high TB burden countries. Due to high density of population every year the number of Tuberculosis (TB) patients are increasing in Bangladesh. Objective: To analyze the clinical profiles and radiological features of the pleural fluid (PF) among tuberculous pleural effusion (TPE) patients attending Bangladesh Medical College, Dhanmondi, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Methods: This is a hospital-record based cross sectional observational study executed in a tertiary care teaching hospital, Dhanmondi, Dhaka. The study group comprises 182 diagnosed tuberculous pleural effusion patients enrolled in our Bangladesh Medical College Hospital from July 2020 to June 2022. Analysis of data was done by using SPSS 15 software. Results: In our observational study we found that tuberculous pleural effusion was predominant in the male gender (62%) with predominant age group of 31-40 years (36.26%). Among various clinical manifestations the predominant features were fever (89.56%), chest pain (63.19%) and night sweats (51.09%). Duration of TPE patients was 16-30 days (69.78%) when they presented to us. During BMI measurements we found that 56.59% of our patients were within normal BMI range and only 7.14% were undernourished indicating the assumption that low BMI or undernutrition is not a vulnerability factor anymore. 72% of our TPE patients belonged from urban locality. During radiological analysis of pleural fluid through chest x ray we have observed that 60.98% cases were right sided small (65.38%) pleural effusion and 36.81% had loculated pleural effusion. 59.89% of our patients got cured with anti TB medications but we lost follow ups to some of our study populations 15.93%. There were no mortality records during our study period. Conclusion: Most common manifestations of tuberculous pleural effusion were low grade fever and chest pain. TPE was predominant among young adults in our study which we need to be more attentive during our diagnosis and treating patients with pleural effusion.