Tuberculosis Incidence And Its Predictive Factors Among Patients Receiving Antiretroviral Therapy In Dilla Hospital, Ethiopia

Dear Editor-in-ChiefThe convergence of tuberculosis (TB) and the HIV epidemic pose new public health challenges. The interaction between HIV and TB in co-infected persons is bidirectional and synergistic, HIV infection predisposes to the development of active TB, and on the course of HIV-related im-munodeficiency is worsened by active TB infec-tion. TB is the most common opportunistic in-fection seen in HIV patients as well as a leading cause of death in these patients. WHO estimates 9.6 million individuals who developed incident tuberculosis in 2014, of which, 1.3 million or 12%, were co-infected with HIV. Almost three-quarter of these cases were in the African region (1). Ethiopia experiences a heavy burden of communicable infectious diseases and tuberculo-sis still a major public health problem. World-wide, Ethiopia is one of the 22 high TB burden and 27 high MDR-TB burden countries. Accord-ing to the 2014 WHO TB report, the incidence of all forms of TB, TB mortality, and TB/HIV co-infected patients mortality were 224, 32 and 5.9 per 100,000 populations, respectively. Studies across regions have consistently documented high TB incidence in the first year of ART (2). The aim of this study was to assess the incidence of TB in people receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) and to determine its predictive factors at Dilla Hospital, Gedeo zone, Ethiopia.A retrospective cohort study was conducted in HIV adult patients aged 15 yr and above clients enrolled in ART care follow-up and receiving antiretroviral therapy during 2010-2014. A total of 1391 ART participants enrolled in Dilla Hos-pital, contributing 3648 person-year of observa-tion with a median follow-up of 3 yr. The TB incidence rate was 5.1/100 person-year (PY) for patients with HIV. The mean age of ART pa-tients were 32.57, male participants were 54.7%. More than half of the patients lived in urban area and 89.6% patients disclosed their HIV status for their relatives. The mean CD4 count was 165 cells/mm3 and 456(32.5%) of HIV clients were categorized under WHO clinical stage III and IV. The mean BMI was 18.7% kg/m2 and 40.1% of the patients were underweight (defined by BMI