Prediction of delayed treatment response in pulmonary tuberculosis: use of time to positivity values of Bactec cultures.

New drugs that can shorten tuberculosis (TB) treatment and target drug resistant strains are urgently needed. A test which could predict patients at risk of a delayed response to treatment would facilitate clinical trials of new anti-tuberculosis drugs. A widely-used test for the assessment of response to treatment is sputum smear examination. Patients who are smear positive after 2 and 3 months of treatment are said to have delayed and significantly delayed treatment responses respectively. Time to positivity (TTP) values of Bactec cultures, from the first 2 weeks of treatment were used to predict delayed and significantly delayed treatment responses in patients with first time pulmonary tuberculosis. Changes in TTP values early in treatment were transformed to a response ratio (r). Values of r that were less than a threshold value (r(c)) indicated patients who were at risk of having delayed or significantly delayed response to treatment. Accuracy of prediction was sensitive to the timing of sputum sampling and adherence to therapy in the first 2 weeks. Based on TTP data from the first 2 weeks of treatment, significantly delayed treatment response could be predicted with a sensitivity of 75% and a specificity of 62% while the positive (PPV) and negative predictive values (NPV) were 14% and 97% respectively. While the high NPV indicates that a large proportion of patients with a satisfactory response to treatment can be reliably identified, the low PPV value underlines the need to use TTP in conjunction with other markers of disease activity to predict unfavourable treatment response in tuberculosis treatment.