Newer Diagnostic Tests for Pulmonary Tuberculosis in Children.

Abstract

It has been well recognized that the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis in children is often compromised by non-specific symptoms, paucibacillary nature of the disease, and the difficulty in collecting the specimen. Consequently, most tuberculosis cases in children are not confirmed, due to which the estimation of the global burden of tuberculosis in children may be inaccurate. There has also been a common misperception that diagnosis of tuberculosis and collecting respiratory specimen in children is always difficult. Because of this, microbiological confirmation of tuberculosis in young children is not routinely attempted in most endemic areas. With the emergence of HIV-related tuberculosis disease and drug-resistant tuberculosis, the availability of accurate, rapid and child friendly diagnostic tools to identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis in respiratory specimen are urgently required in endemic settings. There have been a large number of studies evaluating new diagnostic tests for tuberculosis in the past decade, but few have been evaluated in children. This review will address the developments in respiratory specimen collection and laboratory diagnostic tests of tuberculosis, with a focus on those that have been evaluated in children.