role of sputum culture in paediatrics

Children with severe therapy-resistant asthma (STRA) have poor control despite maximal treatment, while those with difficult asthma (DA) have poor control from failure to implement basic management, including adherence to therapy. Although recognised as clinically distinct, the airway molecular phenotype, including the role of innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) and their response to steroids in DA and STRA is unknown.Immunophenotyping of sputum and blood ILCs and T-cells from STRA, DA and non-asthmatic controls was undertaken...

SETTING: A tertiary care teaching hospital in New Delhi, India. OBJECTIVE: To determine the sensitivity and specificity of the Xpert(®) MTB/RIF assay in paediatric pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) using MGIT™ culture as gold standard. METHODS: After ethical approval had been obtained, 50 patients aged 0-14 years with suspected PTB were enrolled. Sputum/induced sputum and gastric lavage from the participants were sent for direct smear, MGIT culture and Xpert testing...

SETTING: Department of Microbiology, National Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases, New Delhi, India. OBJECTIVES: As paediatric tuberculosis (TB) is a surrogate marker for actively transmitted disease in a community, we investigated drug resistance patterns of 97 Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains isolated from children and explored their phylogenetic associations. DESIGN: A total of 111 paediatric patients who attended the out-patient department during the study period 2009-2011 and whose sputum samples were sent to the Microbiology Department for liquid culture and drug susceptibility testing (DST) were included in this study...

BACKGROUND: Diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) is difficult in infants and young children. For microbiological confirmation of PTB children, sequential gastric lavage (GL) is recommended. Induced sputum (IS) may be an alternative or complementary tool, but the information is limited in children in developed countries. The aim of this study is to assess the safety and diagnostic yield from IS combined with GL for PTB diagnosis in non-HIV infected children. METHODS: The study involved 22 children with suspected PTB admitted to the Getafe Hospital from January 2007 to May 2011...

Extrapulmonary tuberculosis (EPTB) accounts for more than 20% of tuberculosis (TB) cases. Xpert MTB/RIF (Xpert) (Cepheid, Sunnyvale, CA, USA) is a fully automated amplification system, for which excellent results in the diagnosis of pulmonary TB in highly endemic countries have been recently reported. We aimed to assess the performance of the Xpert system in diagnosing EPTB in a low incidence setting. We investigated with Xpert a large number of consecutive extrapulmonary clinical specimens (1,476, corresponding to 1,068 patients) including both paediatric (494) and adult samples...

OBJECTIVES: To identify the causative bacteria in childhood acute respiratory infections (ARI) and to determine the usefulness of pus cell counts in differentiating between pathogenic and commensal bacteria, cultured from nasopharyngeal aspirates. DESIGN: Case control prospective study. SETTING: Outpatients' department and the paediatric unit at General Hospital, Colombo South. SUBJECTS: 200 children under 5 years with cough and difficulty in breathing for less than one week who had no history of antibiotic therapy for the current illness, and 50 healthy controls matched for age and sex...