Publications by authors named "Ghazaleh Farmanfarmaei"
This study investigates the short-term effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic lockdown on tracing and detection of tuberculosis (TB) patients in Tehran, Iran. Results of this study have demonstrated that due to the significant decrease in the identification of patients with suspected TB during the COVID-19 outbreak in Tehran, it is imperative that patients with suspected TB be tracked and diagnosed more quickly to make up for some of the decline in TB diagnosis in recent months and to recover lost cases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Patients with mixed-strain Mycobacterium tuberculosis infections may be at a high risk of poor treatment outcomes. However, the mechanisms through which mixed infections affect the clinical manifestations are not well recognized. Evidence suggests that failure to detect the pathogen diversity within the host can influence the clinical results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMixed (polyclonal) infections are one of the main problems in tuberculosis (TB) management. The best available method for detecting polyclonal infections in TB is mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit-variable number tandem repeat (MIRU-VNTR). According to multiple studies, MIRU-VNTR method can be applied to detect TB-related polyclonal infections in sputum samples or cultures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- * In the analysis, old samples showed no mixed infections, while 44.4% of fresh samples revealed mixed infections in clinical samples, but none in cultures.
- * The research found significant allelic changes in old samples compared to their cultures, indicating that fresh clinical samples provide a clearer understanding of polyclonal infections and highlight the challenges in using older samples.
Article Synopsis
- The study finds that over 50% of tuberculosis cases in Tehran involve polyclonal infections, where multiple strains coexist.
- Spoligotyping results showed that 57.1% of the analyzed patients had different genetic patterns in their clinical samples compared to their cultures, indicating the presence of mixed infections.
- The researchers suggest that in areas with high rates of mixed infections, like Iran, relying solely on Spoligotyping from clinical samples might lead to misleading interpretations.
The application of MIRU-VNTR has unveiled that infection by Mycobacterium tuberculosis can be polyclonal. Our comparative study demonstrated that based on the studied samples (clinical specimen or culture) detection of polyclonal M. tuberculosis infection can be significantly different.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMixed strain infections of Mycobacterium tuberculosis make diagnosis, treatment, and control of tuberculosis (TB) more difficult. This study was aimed to evaluate the relationship between mixed infections, antibiotic resistance patterns and treatment of TB patients. In this study, among 2850 suspected TB clinical samples, a total of ninety-six clinical samples from 66 TB confirmed patients were subjected to the 24-locus variable-number tandem repeat method to evaluate the prevalence of mixed infections.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Prompt genotyping of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) is crucial for improving molecular epidemiological investigation of tuberculosis (TB).
Methods: We performed a retrospective study to evaluate the use of 24 loci MIRU-VNTR (mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit-variable number of tandem-repeat) directly on 135 clinical samples from 84 TB patients.