RESUMO
BACKGROUND: The British Medical Research Council (BMRC) staging has been extensively used to evaluate the disease severity and establish the approximate prognosis of tuberculous meningitis. AIMS: This study aimed at analyzing the predictive accuracy for mortality and neurological sequelae of a set of clinical features, laboratory tests and imaging. METHODS: We compared the British Medical Research Council (BMRC) staging with a new scoring proposal to predict the prognosis of patients with Central Nervous System Tuberculosis. Data from Ecuador was collected. A score was built using a Spiegelhalter and Knill-Jones method and compared with BMRC staging with a ROC curve. RESULTS: A total of 213/310 patients (68.7%) were in BMRC stage II or III. Fifty-seven patients died (18.3%) and 101 (32.5%) survived with sequelae. The associated predictors were consciousness impairment (p = 0.010), motor deficit (p = 0.003), cisternal effacement (p = 0.006) and infarcts (p = 0.015). The new score based on these predictors yielded a larger area under the curve of 0.76 (95% CI: 0.70-0.82), but not significantly different from the BMRC (0.72: 95% CI: 0.65-0.77). CONCLUSIONS: This modern score is easy to apply and could be a sound predictor of poor prognosis. However, the availability of modern tests did not improve the ability to predict a bad outcome.
Assuntos
Diagnóstico por Imagem/métodos , Mycobacterium tuberculosis/isolamento & purificação , Tuberculose Meníngea/diagnóstico , Adulto , Progressão da Doença , Equador/epidemiologia , Feminino , Humanos , Incidência , Masculino , Prognóstico , Curva ROC , Estudos Retrospectivos , Índice de Gravidade de Doença , Taxa de Sobrevida/tendências , Tuberculose Meníngea/epidemiologia , Tuberculose Meníngea/microbiologiaRESUMO
OBJECTIVE: To determine how many more patients would be treated when lowering the treatment threshold for tuberculous meningitis. METHODS: From 1989 to 2004 findings of patients with symptoms lasting more than 1 week and inflammatory changes of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) were collected. Several models of latent class analysis were tested. Cumulative numbers of cases were plotted against different cut-offs for post-test probability. RESULTS: In a cohort of 232 patients the prevalence of tuberculous meningitis (TBM) was estimated at 79.8% (95% CI. 67,0-88,1); probabilities above 80% were reached in 73% of patients. Lowering this threshold from 80% to 20% would add 14% more patients to be treated, for a total of 87%. A further lowering of the threshold to 5% would imply 5% more patients to be treated, bringing the cumulative number to 92%. The difference of lowering the threshold from 80% to 5% was 19%. CONCLUSION: In this setting, at least 75% of patients showing suggestive symptoms for more than a week and CSF changes very probably had TBM. The number of patients that should be treated does not increase linearly when lowering the threshold.