Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) TB statistics for India for 2017 gives an estimated incidence of 2.8 million cases of TB for India out of a global incidence of 9.6 million. Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the common problems in every part of the world. India is the country with the highest burden of TB. The highest burden is carried by people who already face socio-economic challenges: migrants, refugees, prisoners, miners and others working and living in risk-prone settings, and marginalized women, children and older people. Anti tuberculosis treatment (ATT) is an effective treatment strategy for TB. As with all good things comes bad, ATT is associated with adverse effects, so it is very important to identify these adverse effects at the earliest, treat them and improve compliance. Hence this study intends to find out the occurrence of side effects of anti-tuberculosis drugs in patients registered under DOTS in our hospital. The main objectives of the study was to study the adverse drug effects of first line antituberculosis drugs in patients started on DOTS under RNTCP.
Methodology: Pulmonary tuberculosis patients who were started on Antituberculosis drugs under DOTS were clinically observed for adverse drug reactions (ADR) during the course of the treatment.
Results: Out of the 50 patients selected for this study, 30 patients developed at least one or more types of ADR and a total of 9 types of adverse drug reactions were observed. The most common symptom ADR observed in this study were gastrointestinal symptoms like nausea (28%), vomiting (13%), loss of taste (11%), dyspepsia (6%) and abdominal pain (9%), diarrhea (2%), jaundice (3%), others were malaise (9%) and skin rash (1%). The mean onset of the adverse drug effects were observed within 7 days and mean duration of the adverse drug effects were seen up to 2 months after start of ATT.
Conclusions: This study showed that DOTS treatment is an effective and safe treatment strategy as most of the adverse drug reactions noted were of a mild variety (Hartwig’s scale level 1) and were treated with symptomatic medications. Gastrointestinal symptoms were the most common type of ADR and most of the symptoms subsided within the intensive phase of the treatment.
Keywords: Anti Tuberculosis treatment; Adverse drug reaction; Tuberculosis.
