FEATURES OF THE CLINICAL COURSE OF LATENT TUBERCULOSIS INFECTION IN CHILDREN WITH CONTACT A PATIENT WITH TUBERCULOSIS

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the features of the clinical course of latent tuberculosis infection in children with confirmed and unestablished contact with a TB patient. We examined 350 children with PTBI aged 1 to 17 years. In Ukraine, over the past 17 years, the number of children with PTB has decreased by more than 8 times, due to underdetection of children infected with MDR-TB due to a significant reduction in screening tuberculin diagnostics in children, especially since 2013. In the vast majority (108 out of 134) of cases, contact of a child with a TB patient is detected indirectly during a thorough examination of the environment of a child with PTBI, which indicates the important role of screening children to identify adults with TB. Children are characterized by close family contact – 76.1%, mainly with their mother and father. More than half of the children, regardless of contact, had concomitant pathology. Almost half of the children were found to have a mild intoxication syndrome, peripheral lymph node polyadenia was found in 46.4% of children with confirmed contact and in 22.7% of children without confirmed contact, p < 0.05. The results of our study indicate the need for a qualitative examination of the environment of a child with LTBI to identify adult patients with tuberculosis.