Abstract

It has been shown that the incidence of tuberculosis is higher in dialysis patients than general population. We retrospectively compared herein, the prevalance, frequency, clinical features and outcome of tuberculosis in patients on chronic hemodialysis (HD) and peritoneal dialysis (PD) program for more than three months. We screened 1040 HD and 345 PD patients. The prevalence of tuberculosis was higher in HD group (n=34; 3.27%) than the PD group (n=4; 1.16%) (p=0.037). The mean age was higher in the HD group (51.5±13.3 vs. 26.7±5.9 years). The rate of extrapulmonary tuberculosis was 50% in both groups. In the HD group, treatment ended with cure in 20 patients, was still ongoing in 13 patients and one patient died of pulmonary tuberculosis. Of the four in the PD group, two were cured, one died of tuberculoma of the brain and the other has completed the first four months of treatment at the time of analysis. The lower prevalence of tuberculosis in PD population may be related with different demographic and socioeconomic factors as well as the modality of dialysis.

Key words: Hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, tuberculosis, prevalence.