Metabolic disorders in patients with post-COVID-19 Tuberculosis: A Peruvian unicentric experience

Abstract

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the diagnosis, monitoring, and prevention of many significant pathologies began to be ignored, tuberculosis (TB) being one of these pathologies. The objective was to determine metabolic disorders and their association with TB stages in post-COVID-19 TB patients from the Félix Torrealva Gutiérrez Hospital in Ica, Peru. Methods: The research was observational, cross-sectional, and descriptive-correlational. The study was carried out on 80 patients diagnosed with post-COVID-19 tuberculosis. A questionnaire was used to collect the sociodemographic characteristics and the metabolites analyzed were glucose, lipid profile, and hepatic profile. Results: Among the 80 patients, a mean age of 56.6 years was observed and 52.5% were male. The presence of sensitive tuberculosis (56.3%), multiresistant tuberculosis (15%), and recurrent tuberculosis (28.7%) with 5.94 months of treatment was found. Alterations were found in the concentration of glucose (36.3%), total cholesterol (31.3%), triglycerides (52.5%), HDL (52.5%), LDL (53.8%), albumin (32.5%), total bilirubin (46.3%), direct bilirubin (5.0%), TGO (30.0%), TGP (56.3%), alkaline phosphatase (50.0%), GGTP (46.3%) and total protein (22.5%). TB stage was significantly associated with sex (p=0.011), treatment time (p˂0.001) and total cholesterol (p=0.021). Conclusions: There are post-COVID-19 metabolic disorders in patients with tuberculosis at the Félix Torrealva Gutiérrez Hospital in Ica, Peru.