Impacts of clofazimine on the treatment outcomes of drug-resistant tuberculosis

Background The purpose of this research was to evaluate the effect of clofazimine on drug-resistant tuberculosis treatment outcomes. Methods A systematic search was conducted in the PubMed, Web of Science and EMBASE databases to identify eligible studies published up to July 10, 2021. The search terms were as follows: "clofazimine," "tuberculosis," "multidrug resistant tuberculosis" or "extensively drug resistant tuberculosis" and their synonyms or similar words. Two researchers independently screened the titles, abstracts, and full texts for inclusion. Meta-analysis was performed with Stata version 16.0 (Stata Corp., College Station, Texas, USA). Risk ratios (RRs) with 95% CIs were calculated to evaluate the treatment outcome. Results Eight studies including 3219 participants were included in the meta-analysis. The meta-analysis found that the rates of treatment completion was higher in patients receiving clofazimine-containing regimens than in those not receiving clofazimine-containing regimens (RR: 1.185 (1.060-1.325), P = 0.003). Significant reduction in treatment failure (RR: 0.598 (0.473-0.756), P Conclusions This study demonstrated that compared with patients who do not receive clofazimine, this drug has the potential to achieve a higher favorable outcome, treatment completion and cure rates, and a lower treatment failure risk among drug-resistant tuberculosis cases.