Study of mutations in rpo b gene in rifampicin resistant mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from doda region of jammu and kashmir

Abstract

newline newline The current prospective study aimed to investigate mutations in rpo-B gene in Rifampicin resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from Doda region of Jammu and Kashmir. It was observed that, out of 3600 samples processed the specificity of Ziehl- Neelsen (ZN) staining was lower as compared to other methods as 233 patients were found positive using CBNAAT and 203 were found positive with ZN Staining. There were 203 (87.12%) positive cases and 30 (12.88%) negative cases. From both ZN staining and CBNAAT, it was confirmed that mostly positive cases in males were in the age group of 21-90 years while for females, it was 21-80 years. In common for both sexes, maximum TB positivity was seen for 51-60 years (64; 27.46%) and 21-30 years (63; 27.3%). After analysing for rifampicin resistance from 233 pulmonary tuberculosis patients, only 8 patients showed positive results where 2 were from the age group of 11-30 years (25%), 4 from 31-50 years newline(50%) and 2 were above 50 (25%). It was found that 128 (54.9%) males and 105 (45%) females were positive for tuberculosis. For rifampicin resistance also, there were more male patients (n=5) (62.5%) than female patients (n=3) (37.5%). This study is conducted for the first time in Doda region to detect mutations (81bp) against rifampicin via CBNAAT which lied within the hot spot region of 81bp RRDR of rpo-B gene of 08 M. tuberculosis clinical isolates, although codon regions remained similar to already reported ones (516, 526, 531) in tuberculosis strains obtained from MDR TB positive patients. newlineThis study will open new horizons for early detection and improvement of drug treatment regimens to make it more effective to treat the drug resistance in TB. newline