Chest
Clinical InvestigationsTUBERCULOSISDoes Aging Modify Pulmonary Tuberculosis?: A Meta-Analytical Review
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
A search for comparative studies related to pulmonary TB in older and younger subjects was made in June 1998 using the entire MEDLINE database (from 1966 to 1998) through the Internet site of the National Library of Medicine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). The terms“ pulmonary TB AND (aged OR aging OR old OR older OR elder OR elderly)” appearing in any field of the database records retrieved 7,440 articles. Further searching for “comparative OR comparison OR compared” in any field yielded 1,011
Results
As can be seen in Table 1, all of the studies included inpatients in their populations, while outpatients were also included in half of them. The pooled number of patients was comprised of a total population of 859 older and 1,801 younger patients. There was a noticeable variability in the results obtained by these studies, both in the clinical features and the auxiliary tests (Table 2), as well as in the radiologic findings (Table 3). Because many variables were not uniformly present in all of
Discussion
In this work, a meta-analytical review was performed of the main clinical, radiologic, and laboratory features of TB in older patients, as compared to younger patients. In relation to the gender of the patients, we found that male predominance was consistently described by most of the analyzed reported series, and the magnitude of this predominance, as indicated by the meta-analysis, was not different between younger and older patients. The reason for the higher frequency of TB in male subjects
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For editorial comment see page 856.