Research published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine shows the most commonly used test for tuberculosis — tuberculin skin test — fails to accurately diagnose TB in half of pregnant, HIV-positive women.
"The World Health Organization and many governments endorse the TST because it is a cheap and ubiquitous test," said Jyoti Mathad, MD, the study's lead author and an instructor at the Center for Global Health at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. "However, our over-reliance on this single test means that we are failing to detect and treat a potentially life-threatening infection in tens of millions of high-risk women."
Dr. Mathad and other researchers tested 252 pregnant women in India for TB during pregnancy or at delivery, and an additional 39 women in a longitudinal study who were tested at delivery and three months after birth. They compared TST to the Quantiferon Gold In Tube blood test.
"We found that QGIT positivity was almost three times higher than the more widely used TST at every time point tested," the authors wrote.