[Behavior of predictive variables of exacerbations of the COPD in the neumological hospital of Cuba.].

The use of predictive variables of exacerbations of the COPD is not a practice generalized in our environment, for what we cannot characterize the exacerbating patient neither to design strategies for its integral handling. There was carried out a prospective descriptive study to correlate in patient with diagnosis of COPD from the Neumologic Hospital of Cuba, with the objective of determining the association between clinical, functional variables and imagenological and the exacerbations frequency a year. The population was constituted for patients with clinical diagnosis of COPD and the sample for those patients with confirmed diagnosis that they completed the inclusion approaches.

[Tuberculosis risk assessment in the staff of the National University Pneumologic Hospital of Havana].

Introduction: tuberculosis is traditionally considered as a professional disease in health care workers.

Objective: to evaluate the individual and collective tuberculosis infection risk by areas or departments in the National University Pneumologiic Hospital of Havana, Cuba.

Methods: the individual risk was assessed during 2008-2009 by means of a survey administered to the staff that includes personal data, labor location and exposition to M.

[An alternative for improving the diagnosis of smear-negative tuberculosis and other bronchopulmonary disorders in Cuba].

Objective: The diagnosis of tuberculosis in patients with negative acid-fast bacillus smears poses a challenge to both clinicians and public health authorities. In an attempt to aid diagnosis in such cases, an expert committee was established in Ciudad de La Habana, Cuba in 1995. The aim of this study was to describe the progress of the committee's work and the corresponding results for the period 1996 through 2003.

Adjuvant interferon gamma in patients with drug - resistant pulmonary tuberculosis: a pilot study.

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) is increasing in the world and drug-resistant (DR) disease beckons new treatments.

Methods: To evaluate the action of interferon (IFN) gamma as immunoadjuvant to chemotherapy on pulmonary DR-TB patients, a pilot, open label clinical trial was carried out in the Cuban reference ward for the management of this disease. The eight subjects existing in the country at the moment received, as in-patients, 1 x 10(6) IU of recombinant human IFN gamma intramuscularly, daily for one month and then three times per week up to 6 months as adjuvant to the indicated chemotherapy, according to their antibiograms and WHO guidelines.