Active clinical trials for "Tuberculosis"

The purpose of this study was to investigate if adjuvant treatment with arginine (the substrate for nitric oxide production) rich food supplements could improve clinical outcome in patients with smear positive tuberculosis by affecting nitric oxide production.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate and further refine a mobile support tool for patients receiving treatment for active tuberculosis. Half of participants will receive support and monitoring using a mobile phone software application and usual care, while the other half will receive usual care.

The many gaps observed in the cascade of care of tuberculosis (TB) child contacts occur mostly in the screening, preventive therapy (PT) initiation and PT completion steps and the main drivers of these gaps are considered to be the health system infrastructure, limited worker resources and parents' reluctance to bring their children to the facility for screening. There would be great advantages of using a symptom-based screening at community level where only the symptomatic contacts are referred to hospital for further evaluation and asymptomatic contacts are started on PT in the community. Household or community-based screening is likely to improve the uptake and acceptability of child contact screening and management as well as adherence to PT and to reduce cost and workload at facility level. This study proposes to compare the cascade of care between two models for TB screening and management of household TB child contacts in two high TB burden and limited resource countries, Cameroon and Uganda. In the facility-based model, children will be screened at facility (Cameroon) or household level (Uganda) and preventive therapy initiation, refills of PT therapy and follow-up will be done at facility level. In the intervention group (community-based model), child contacts will be screened in the household by a community health worker (CHW). Those with symptoms suggestive of TB will be referred to the facility for TB investigations. Asymptomatic child contacts from high risk groups (under-5 years or HIV infected 5-14) will be initiated on PT (3 months isoniazid-rifampicin) in the household. Refills of PT therapy will also be done in the communities by the CHW. In both models, symptomatic children requiring further investigations for TB diagnosis will be referred to a health facility.

This study is a U.S.-based, 1 site (with 4 clinical settings), randomized controlled trial (with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Antibiotic Resistance Solutions Initiative) that will be implemented to evaluate traditional directly observed therapy (DOT) and electronic forms of DOT (eDOT) for tuberculosis (TB) treatment. The trial will assess whether eDOT that employs electronic communication methods, such as video via computer or cellphone, is a non-inferior approach to monitor TB treatment adherence, compared to traditional in-person DOT (ipDOT), in which a trained person is in the physical presence of patients as anti-TB drugs are ingested. ipDOT is the single best intervention proven to be successful when it comes to TB patients' adherence to therapy (which reduces risk of acquired drug resistance). However, ipDOT is resource intensive and many times challenging to facilitate in-person. If eDOT is found to be non-inferior to ipDOT, health departments and other clinicians might be able to provide eDOT to certain populations of TB patients in a more flexible and potentially cost-saving manner.

The Alcohol Drinkers' Exposure to Preventive Therapy for TB (ADEPTT) will examine the safety and tolerability of, and adherence to, 6 months of daily INH (6H) in 300 TB and HIV-infected persons (200 drinkers and 100 non-drinkers) in Uganda. The first aim is to evaluate the safety and tolerability of 6H overall and by level of alcohol use. The second aim is to estimate adherence and compare adherence by level of alcohol use and at 3 and 6 months. Self-reported measures of alcohol use will be augmented by phosphatidylethanol (PEth), an established biomarker of alcohol use. Objective measures of adherence will include electronic pill bottle monitoring and a novel measure of INH exposure, INH concentration in hair. The study will actively monitor for hepatotoxicity using the U.S. standard of care for TB preventive therapy for heavy drinkers and discontinue if any Grade 3/4 toxicities are detected. The investigators will use the safety, tolerability, and adherence results, together with the known efficacy and mortality benefit of TB preventive therapy in HIV-infected persons in SSA, and an established decision analytic model of TB preventive therapy to conduct the third aim: to determine whether the benefits of TB preventive therapy outweigh the toxicity risks for HIV-infected drinkers in resource limited settings. The study will additionally follow the cohort every 6 months after completing INH to monitor drinking and the development of active TB.

This study aims to evaluate the vitamin D supplementation effect to improve clinical outcomes in children with pulmonary tuberculosis treatment. This randomized, double-blind control trial with a cohort design was conducted in West Borneo from December 2020 - July 2021. A Total 84 patients met the inclusion criteria; aged 6 to 18 years old, newly diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis with vitamin D insufficiency. Only 80 patients completed the six months follow-up. The intervention was 1,000 IU vitamin D or placebo for six months treatment. Comparison of clinical conditions and nutritional status are analyzed statistically.

The overall goal of the IQ-MAPLE project is to improve the quality of care provided to patients with several heart, lung and blood conditions by facilitating more accurate and complete problem list documentation. In the first aim, the investigators will design and validate a series of problem inference algorithms, using rule-based techniques on structured data in the electronic health record (EHR) and natural language processing on unstructured data. Both of these techniques will yield candidate problems that the patient is likely to have, and the results will be integrated. In Aim 2, the investigators will design clinical decision support interventions in the EHRs of the four study sites to alert physicians when a candidate problem is detected that is missing from the patient's problem list - the clinician will then be able to accept the alert and add the problem, override the alert, or ignore it entirely. In Aim 3, the investigators will conduct a randomized trial and evaluate the effect of the problem list alert on three endpoints: alert acceptance, problem list addition rate and clinical quality.

Task shifting of less complex healthcare tasks to lay health workers (LHWs) is increasingly employed strategy to address the global shortage of skilled health workers. Despite availability of effective treatment, tuberculosis (TB) remains an important cause of mortality with 1.3 million lives lost globally to TB in 2012. The greatest proportion of new TB cases occurs in Africa and over 95% of TB deaths occur in low income countries (LICs). In response to the combined high TB burden and severe healthcare worker shortages in these settings, outpatient TB care is among the tasks commonly shifted to LHWs. LHWs are community members who have received some training but are not healthcare professionals. Randomised trials show LHWs improve access to basic health services and TB treatment outcomes, however, insufficient training and supervision are recognized barriers to their effectiveness. The investigators' goal is to improve TB care provided by LHWs in Malawi by implementing and evaluating a knowledge translation (KT) strategy designed to facilitate incorporation of evidence into LHW practice. The investigators will employ a mixed methods design including a pragmatic cluster randomized controlled trial to evaluate effectiveness of the strategy and qualitative methods to understand barriers and facilitators to scalability and sustainability of the program.

TB041 is a clinical challenge trial primarily to evaluate the safety of BCG challenge administered by the aerosol inhaled route in healthy, BCG naive UK adults. The trial will also look to evaluate and compare the amount of BCG recovered from the lungs and from the skin, following challenge by either the aerosol or the intradermal route.

Despite increased emphasis on evidence based practice in recent years a gap remains between evidence and practice, particularly in resource poor countries. Few studies to date have examined the use of knowledge translation strategies to improve health care outcomes in low income countries. However, given that the majority of health care in these settings is provided by workers with less training and limited resources, the theoretical potential for knowledge translation strategies to improve health care delivery and outcomes by integrating best evidence into routine practice may be greatest in these settings. Knowledge translation (KT) is an approach to changing health care provider behavior to reduce the gap between evidence and practice in health care delivery. There has been a tendency for knowledge translation interventions to employ generic, "off the shelf", strategies, and apply them to deal with specific issues. This generic approach, fails to recognize the variability in the specific characteristics of health care settings, in terms of their patient populations, health care systems, and health care providers. These characteristics, whether they function as barriers or facilitators to change, make a generalized approach to KT ineffective, where a tailored strategy, which specifically adjusts its approach to measured local barriers and facilitators may achieve better alignment of practice to evidence. This is likely to be particularly true in low income countries where the majority of health care is provided by non-physician health care workers, working within a wider range of health care systems, with variable and unique patient populations and resource constraints. Given the potential to significantly impact health care outcomes at relatively low cost, further research is needed both to develop methods for identifying potential barriers and facilitators to KT strategies in specific resource poor settings, and to evaluate the effectiveness of KT strategies tailored to address the identified barriers. This study will assess the effectiveness of a two part knowledge translation intervention tailored to address factors identified in a previous study as functioning as barriers and facilitators to treatment adherence among patients on treatment for tuberculosis or combined tuberculosis and antiretroviral treatment, targeting improved patient adherence and health outcomes, in a specific low income country.