Diabetes changes the outcome of tuberculosis?

Background: Diabetes has become a global epidemic affecting children, adolescents, and adults. It is recognized as a group of heterogeneous disorders with the common elements of hyperglycemia and glucose intolerance, due to insulin deficiency, impaired effectiveness of insulin action, or both. Diabetes mellitus (DM) is classified on the basis of etiology and clinical presentation of the disorder into four types: type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, gestational diabetes, and other specific types. Failures, deaths, relapse rates and favorable outcomes (cured/treatment completed) were comparable in pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) patients with or without DM. It is also documented that in well-controlled diabetes the course of pulmonary tuberculosis is not different from that in patients without diabetes.Methods: Diabetic patients visiting the outpatient department/diabetic clinic of our facility were enrolled after taking written informed consent. The data on socio-demographic and diabetic parameters and examination findings were recorded on proforma as attached.Results: X-ray findings at start of treatment showed that proportion of patient of group I was higher than group II in left site (26.00% versus 8.00%) and proportion of patient of group II was higher than group I in right site (58.00% versus 48.00%) and bilateral (34.00% versus 26.00%), though left side was affected in higher proportion of group I patients as compared to group II but this difference was not found to be statistically significant.Conclusions: Our study concluded that even though the state in which patient presented that is diabetic or non-diabetic the outcome of treatment didn’t change but the earlier one was more associated with complications and also the healing took more time in patients with diabetes.