What Is Tuberculosis?

Hello,

I am Dr. Parthiv Atul Kumar Shah, Pulmonologist. Today I will talk about tuberculosis. So, the first thing comes to mind is what is tuberculosis? Tuberculosis is an infected disease. It can infect any part of the body except hair and nails. It preferably involves the lung, spine and lymph nodes. Why is it so important to study about tuberculosis? When you look at the health data coming from 2018 report of global health status, it says that India is the leading country for tuberculosis. How do we get tuberculosis? So, tuberculosis is usually caused by a bacterium: mycobacterium tuberculosis. It is usually being spread by the humans while speaking, coughing and sneezing which is released into the air. Then it is inhaled by another person and another person gets the infection. All of us do not manifest the disease. The people who manifest the disease are the people who are suffering from tuberculosis and rest are the only infected organism. What are the signs and symptoms due to which you feel you have got tuberculosis? First and foremost, if it is involving the lungs, the patient usually has the cough for more than 2 weeks, may and may not be associated with the blood in the sputum, breathlessness may be there, fever, unintentional weight loss, night sweat are a few of the symptoms.

The severe form of tuberculosis can involve brain, heart, kidney and adrenal glands. How do we diagnose tuberculosis? The first thing Dr usually does is a routine blood test. If the patient is coughing then the most important modality is a sputum test, chest x-ray. These are the 3 most important things. In rare cases in which the patient is not able to produce the sputum or if the patient is having the blood in the sputum, there is another test in which we can do, we can identify tuberculosis through bronchoscopy. Now, what is it? It is a tool through which we enter into the lung for the diagnosis modality. We take the sample of cough through a tube and then send it for the examination. Once the TB comes positive, the treatment is based on the categories which are followed by the WHO. The categories are 1, 4 and 5. Category 1 is of 6 months which is consist of drugs. Category 4 & 5 are drug-resistant and hence the treatment may vary from 2-3 years. And also you wanna contact me, consult me through Lybrate.

Thank You.