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MONDAY, Aug. 6, 2018 (HealthDay News) — In children with latent tuberculosis, a regimen of four months of rifampin has better rates of completion than nine months of isoniazid, with similar safety profiles, according to a study published in the Aug. 2 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Thierno Diallo, M.D., from the Universit\u00e9 Gamal Abdel Nasser de Conakry in Guinea, and colleagues conducted an open-label trial in which they randomly assigned 844 children (<18 years of age) with latent Mycobacterium tuberculosis<\/i> infection to receive either four months of rifampin or nine months of isoniazid.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that 360 of 422 children (85.3 percent) in the rifampin group completed per-protocol therapy versus 311 of 407 children (76.4 percent) in the isoniazid group (adjusted difference in the rates of treatment completion, 13.4 percentage points). Less than 5 percent of the children in the combined groups had grade 1 or 2 adverse events that were deemed possibly related to a trial drug, and there were no significant differences in the rates of adverse events between the groups. During follow-up, active tuberculosis, including one case with resistance to isoniazid, was diagnosed in two children in the isoniazid group versus no cases in the rifampin group.<\/p>\n
“Among children under the age of 18 years, treatment with four months of rifampin had similar rates of safety and efficacy but a better rate of adherence than nine months of treatment with isoniazid,” the authors write.<\/p>\n