Abstract
Background: Pakistan is the fifth most heavily afflicted country by tuberculosis (TB) in the world. This study aimed to investigate the epidemiological characteristics of TB in two northern Pakistani populations using retrospective data analysis.
Methods: We analyzed retrospective data ranging in duration from 2015 to 2022 obtained from tertiary care hospitals in theAbbottabad and Mansehra districts. GraphPad Prism software (version 8.0.1) was used for statistical analysis and data visualization.
Results: Data were obtained from a total of 16,140 TB patients who were enrolled in tertiary care hospitals in their respective populations. Among these patients, ~64% had pulmonary TB, and the remaining 36% had extrapulmonary TB. The difference in the TB incidence rate between male and female patients was not significant (50.3% vs. 49.7%, p>0.05). However, the TB incidence rate increased gradually with age, with the highest incidence rate observed in late adolescence and early adulthood. Overall, we noticed a greater proportion of clinically diagnosed patients than of those diagnosed through bacteriological or histopathological testing (64% vs. 36%, respectively,p<0.05). The proportion of patients who experienced relapse wassignificantly lower than that of patients who experienced new disease(6.8% vs. 93.2%, respectively; p<0.05), and more than 90% of the patients who were initially diagnosed in hospitals successfully completed treatment.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the incidence of pulmonary TB is greater than that of extrapulmonary TB, regardless of patient demographics.