Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med., Vol 153, No. 5, May 1996, 1708-1710.
Relationship of isoniazid resistance to human immunodeficiency virus infection in patients with tuberculosis
S Asch, L Knowles, A Rai, BE Jones, J Pogoda and PF Barnes
Department of Medicine, University of Southern California School of Medicine, Los Angeles 90033, USA.
To investigate the relationship between isoniazid resistance and HIV
infection in patients with tuberculosis, we evaluated data in the Los
Angeles County tuberculosis registry on 1,506 patients for whom drug
susceptibility results were available. Among 235 HIV-infected patients,
isoniazid resistance was less common than in 1,271 patients who were
HIV-seronegative or who had not been tested for HIV, with an unadjusted
odds ratio of 0.3. After adjustment for other factors that affect drug
resistance (ethnicity, country of birth, prior diagnosis of tuberculosis,
and cavitation), the frequency if isoniazid resistance remained lower than
that in patients without HIV infection, with an odds ratio of 0.4 (95%
confidence interval, 0.2 to 0.8; p = 0.02). We conclude that in Los
Angeles, a setting where there is no ongoing outbreak of drug-resistant
tuberculosis, isoniazid-resistant tuberculosis is not more common in
HIV-infected patients.
