Early experience with delamanid-containing regimens in the treatment of complicated multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is an intermediate tuberculosis (TB) burden region with a disease notification rate of 60.5 per 100 000 population in 2015. With the use of supervised treatment since 1970s and the use of drug susceptibility testing (DST) for guiding use of TB drugs for several decades [1], TB drug resistance rates in Hong Kong have declined and the multidrug-resistant (MDR)-TB rate has been kept at ~1%. Successful control of MDR-TB was partly attributable to judicious use of ofloxacin and later levofloxacin in the 1990s [2, 3], the introduction of linezolid in the 2000s [4] among patients with fluoroquinolone-resistant MDR-TB or extensively drug-resistant (XDR)-TB, with intermittent dosing to enable its prolonged use [5], and selective use of delamanid among patients with complicated MDR-TB since 2012. To echo our support for using delamanid in the treatment of MDR-TB [6, 7], we would like to report our early experience in Hong Kong regarding the use of delamanid-containing regimens among patients with pre-XDR-TB (MDR-TB with bacillary resistance to either fluoroquinolone or second-line injectable agents) or XDR-TB.

Source: European Respiratory Journal - June 14, 2018 Category: Respiratory Medicine Authors: Chang, K.-C., Leung, E. C.-C., Law, W.-S., Leung, W.-M., Tai, L.-B., Lee, S.-N., Lam, F.-M., Chau, C.-H., Mok, T. Y.-W., Yew, W.-W., Leung, C.-C. Tags: Original Articles: Research letters Source Type: research