An Insight into the Demographics of Rifampicin Resistance in a Tertiary care setting of Karachi

Background: Multidrug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is a public health issue in Pakistan. The objective of this study was to describe the demographics of rifampicin resistant TB patients in the largest TB associated tertiary care setting in Karachi, Pakistan, which can later be used for active case finding and targeted diagnostic approaches. Methods: A Cross sectional data based study was performed on the demographics of patients labelled as rifampicin resistant using Genexpert® from the period of January 2014 to June 2015 at the Provincial TB reference Laboratory, Dow University of Health Sciences. The records of the patients diagnosed as rifampicin resistant by Genexpert® were tabulated using Microsoft Excel® with anonymization and analyzed using online statistical software. Results: Among the 252 patients labeled as rifampicin resistant using Genexpert®, 133(52.7%) were males, while 119 (47.22%) were females. The mean age for males at diagnosis (32.824 years) was slightly higher than that for females (29.45 years). Mann-Whitney U test, showed that the distribution of age was significantly different in the two groups (p u003c 0.05). After stratification, several differences were observed among different age groups and a higher proportion of rifampicin resistance in the females of the young age groups was observed. Male patients tended to have a higher age at the time of diagnosis within a group, except in the oldest group of patients. Conclusions: Few demographic differences exist in rifampicin resistant patients, which can be used for targeting specific population for active case finding and MDRdiagnosis.