An Epidemiological Study on common Types of Tuberculosis in Al-Najaf city

Tuberculosis is a contagious air transmitted bacterial disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis it mostly infects the lungs, but it may infect other parts of the body, It is considered a series community health problem globally, it is the world second largest cause of death in adults between the infectious diseases after HIV/AIDS.

This study was aimed to estimate the common types of tuberculosis in Al-Najaf city.

This is a case-control study accomplished in the Advisory Clinic for Thoracic and Respiratory Diseases in Al-Najaf city, for the period from December 2017 to August 2018. A total of 70 individuals were included in this study, 37 were diagnosed with tuberculosis by specialist respiratory physician, and 33 were healthy controls. All data that include age, gender, residence, smoking, site of infection and history of diabetes were collected from all participants. The data were analyzed by using the statistical package social system (SPSS).

This study show that pulmonary TB more frequent in men 11(61.1%) than in women 7(38.9%), pleural TB also has high male to female ratio 5 (83.3%) to 1 (16.7%) respectively, and the incidence was also higher in males in bone, peritoneum and meninges TB. In contrast lymph node tuberculosis is found to be predominant in females.

It also found that tuberculosis was more frequent in age interval from (25–50) years old. It also shows that out of total 37 tuberculosis cases 28 cases (75.7%) were from urban area, compared to 9 cases (24.3%) from rural area.

Sex differences affect TB infection, it is significantly higher in male over female except in lymph node TB where it more frequent in female, TB most commonly infects economically active age groups (21–50 years old), it more frequent in urban areas than rural areas.