A correlation of plasma malondialdehyde, whole blood glutathione peroxidase and lipid profile in pulmonary tuberculosis

Tuberculosis is one of the commonest chronic infectious diseases; highly endemic in India, kills five lakh patients every year. Oxidative Stress plays important role in inflammatory & degenerative diseases including pulmonary tuberculosis. There is hardly any one study available in literature correlating oxidative stress, lipid profile values and antioxidant status together with the pulmonary tuberculosis; so we decided to conduct this study.

Study group included newly diagnosed 100 cases of pulmonary tuberculosis and control group included 100, age and sex matched healthy volunteers and employees. All the subjects were subjected to complete physical and systemic examinations, routine investigations including Sputum for AFB by Ziehl-Neelsen staining, AFB culture and Chest x-ray and special tests like fasting lipid profile, plasma malondialdehyde, whole blood glutathione peroxidase and findings recorded and statistically analysed.

In the study group with 66 males and 34 females, we found total cholesterol mean ± SD 149.16±19.02; Triglycerides 114.36±13.38; HDL-C 36.61±4.17; LDL-C 92.78±13.72; VLDL-C 20.04±2.97; MDA 6.03±1.62 and GPx 6192.9±790.75 while in controls with 61 males and 39 females, these values were 183.51±14.63; 134.52±8.48; 43.46±4.65; 111.98±12.62; 28.95±4.95; 1.79±0.50 and 7739.27±429.80 respectively.

Tuberculosis effect more males (66%) than females (34%). TC, TG, HDL-C, LDL-C, VLDL-C and GPx were found statistically significantly lower in study group when compared with control, (p <0.001) while MDA was found significantly higher in study group when compared with control, (p <0.001).