Tuberculosis Diagnosis and Management: Recent Advances

Accurate and rapid diagnosis is crucial for starting effective treatment for tuberculosis (TB) and mitigating the transmission. Globally, nearly one-third of all TB cases remain undetected each year and consequently these are not reported. On top of that, the emergence of drug-resistant TB poses an added challenge. In the past 15 years, several advances have been made for improved diagnosis, including liquid culture and drug susceptibility, line probe assay for drug resistance detection, and cartridge-based nucleic acid amplification tests for rapid diagnosis of TB and drug resistance detection. However, some challenges remain, despite the clear edge of these new advances over the age-old conventional methods. Despite these advances, accurate, affordable, and accessible diagnosis of TB remains a challenge, especially in rural and difficult-to-reach settings, where the most desirable test would be a point-of-care triage test. Nevertheless, several attempts are being made in this direction, and in this article, we review these research advances that can help the TB elimination from India.