A new drug cocktail reduces the length of treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis from nearly two years to nine to 11 months with a similar effectiveness, according to a large clinical trial.
Nearly 6,00,000 people contract multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) every year.
The number of pills an MDR-TB patient would have to take could be reduced from an average of 14,000 to an average of 3,360 over the course of treatment, said Paula Fujiwara, the scientific director of The Union, an NGO that co-funded the STREAM trial, which was described in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Normal” tuberculosis is treated with four antibiotics over a six-month period. .
The new clinical trial, which included nearly 400 patients(all severely affected by the disease), compared the effectiveness of long-term treatment and that of a shorter therapy.
Results showed that the longer, almost two-year treatment course was effective 80% of the time and the shorter treatment plan was effective 79% of the time.
That means patients could take on average of “only” 14 pills per day for an initial 20-week phase and then 10 pills daily in a second 20-week phase (plus a 16- to 20-week course of injections five times per week), instead of 20 pills every day for two years, as is prescribed in the longer treatment plan.