Pulmonary & Respiratory Medicine

Introduction: Pulmonary diseases are responsible for at least 6 million hospitalizations worldwide. These pathologies are dominated in our countries by infections, particularly pulmonary tuberculosis, which makes it a major public health problem.

Methods: We collected all the records of patients hospitalized for pulmonary tuberculosis during 2 years: From January 2019 to January 2021.

Results: We collected 791 cases of tuberculosis among the 2060 patients hospitalized during the study period, i.e. a hospital prevalence of 38.40%. In this population we had a clear male predominance with a sex ratio of 2.22. The distribution of tuberculosis was as follows: pulmonary localization in 92% of cases, bifocal pleural and pulmonary localization in 1.7% of cases, isolated pleural involvement in 5.83% and one case of lymph node tuberculosis. The comorbidities found were diabetes (7.4%), HIV (2.28%), sickle cell disease (0.83%). The average length of stay was 15 days. Complications were dominated by bacterial superinfections (15.8%), pulmonary embolism (11.2%), hemoptysis (6.4%) and pneumothorax (5.3%). We deplored a death rate of 2.23%.

Conclusions: Tuberculosis remains a concern in our emerging countries and access to prevention and the search for comorbidities are essential for good management of the disease.