Photo Credit: Christoph Burgstedt
From 2010 to 2021, tuberculosis incidence in the US among patients with kidney failure was 10-fold that of people without kidney failure, according to results published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Jonathan Wortham, MD, MPH, and colleagues analyzed tuberculosis reported in the US from 2010 to 2021, stratifying cases by kidney failure status. In total, approximately 3% of people (2,892 of 111,155) diagnosed with tuberculosis from 2010 to 2021 also had kidney failure. Annual tuberculosis incidence ranged from 26.1 to 45.4 per 100,000 people with kidney failure and 2.1 to 3.5 per 100,000 people without kidney failure. Among those with kidney failure, 924 (32%) had extrapulmonary tuberculosis only, and nearly 40% died; most (n=792) died during treatment and 286 were diagnosed with tuberculosis after death. People with tuberculosis and kidney failure had approximately twice the prevalence of a false-negative tuberculin skin test result (39%) versus people with tuberculosis only (20%).
