Prevalence of MTB/NTM Infection in Pulmonary and Extrapulmonary Samples among Tuberculosis Suspects in India

Singh Premraj | Bhatia Vinay | Verma Rachna | Dutt Sarjana

Abstract: Tuberculosis is still one of the most wide-spread and serious infectious diseases globally. In addition to the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) plays a significant role as causative agents of opportunistic infections in immunocompromised patients. This study was conducted to evaluate the positivity rate of NTM and MTB in different type of sample with the help of real time PCR. In this study we found that positivity rate for the MTB in the sputum samples was found to be 66.63 %, followed by the urine and the pus samples 36.50 % and 35.71 % respectively. While 65 semen samples showed no positivity. The prevalence of NTM is less as compare to MTB infection in pulmonary samples, while in extrapulmonary samples NTM positivity is high in comparison to MTB.

Keywords: MTB, NTM, Real time PCR, multiplex real time PCR

Edition: Volume 3 Issue 11, November 2014,

Pages: 695 - 697