Utilidad de la técnica genotype MTBDRplus para el diagnóstico de tuberculosis pulmonar

introduction: for the early establishment of effective treatment and control measures to prevent disease transmission ita′s necessary to have simple and fast diagnostic tools to identify m. tuberculosis (mtb) bacilli. objectives: in this study, the usefulness of the genotype mtbdrplus assay for identifying m. tuberculosis in respiratory specimens from patients at hospital universitario san vicente de paúl (husvp) was evaluated. materials and methods: respiratory specimens were collected from 100 patients treated at the husvp to which smear, culture in ogawa kudoh medium and commercial polymerase chain reaction (pcr) genotype mtbdrplus assay were performed. the sensitivity and specificity of pcr were determined in reference to the culture in ogawa kudoh. results: the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value were 86.7 %, 93.7 %, 72.2 % and 97.4 % respectively. sensitivity in smear-positive samples was 100 %, and 60 % in smear-negative samples. the median time for results reporting using pcr was 14 days compared with the 60 days required by the culture (p=0.000). conclusions: genotype mtbdrplus is a good choice for rapid detection of m. tuberculosis in smear positive respiratory specimens.