Real-world evidence paper highlighting the impact of changes to tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment in China
| CONTEXT: China has managed to reduce the incidence rate of tuberculosis (TB) over the last 30 years. This paper published in Infectious Diseases of Poverty journal assesses the effects of China National Health Commission and the Gates Foundation TB Prevention and Control Project. The paper concludes that the quality of TB diagnosis services has improved substantially, but warns that “irrational” use of second-line anti-TB drugs remains a concern. READ TIME: 15 mins  1. “Please refer to Additional file 1: Appendix 2 for details about the checklist. ” 2. “In the selected prefecture, we used the following selection criteria to choose study counties, in total 12 counties involved in the evaluation: a) A county with higher GDP per capita and a county with lower GDP per capita. ” 3. “Routine data collection We used the TB Information Management System (TBIMS), a routine registration data operated by CDCs across China, to obtain TB and DRTB patient information for those registered between January 1–December 31, 2015 and January 1–December 31, 2018 in the study sites. ” 4. “We used the TBIMS data to collect information about the different types of TB diagnostic tests that were performed among SS– patients and bacteriologically confirmed TB cases and coverage of DST for TB patients. ” 5. “Then we compared the information we collected with the national practice guideline to assess the proportion of TB patients who received appropriate tests. ” Source URL: https://idpjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40249-021-00875-8 |