👤 Kevin Komakech

The World Health Organization (WHO) has endorsed a range of diagnostic tuberculosis (TB) over the years. A little is documented about the uptake in the WHO African Region (WHO/FR). We assessed the uptake of the endorsed diagnostic technologies for tuberculosis through a literature review. We reviewed literature in French and English from PubMed, Google Scholar, and Embase for TB diagnostics endorsed by WHO between January 2007 and December 2017, extending to December 2021 for recent technologies. We included publications from the 47 countries in the WHO/AFR. Data were analyzed using PRISMA diagrams and STATA 14.0. Out of 3,399 articles, 1,716 articles were screened, and 92 qualified for analysis. The majority of articles were on Xpert MTB/RIF (XPERT) 22 (47%), Line Probe Assay (LPA), 10 (21%), and Mycobacteria Growth Indicator Tube (MGIT) 9 (19%). For rollout, 11 (24%) of countries had publications on Lipoarabinomannan (LAM) and 16 (36%) on XPERT. The median years for uptake were 6 for MGIT, 5 for XPERT, and 2.5 for LPA. For the rollout, the median years for MGIT, LPA, and XPERT were 7, 6, and 5 respectively. Our study shows that the uptake and rollout are slow. Future studies should identify factors affecting rapid uptake and rollout. Show less

The study examined the association between body composition and beverage consumption and the risk of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and explored the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) involved in these associations by leveraging summary statistics from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in nonoverlapping populations. The IEU OpenGWAS project was sourced for exposure datasets: body mass index, body fat percentage, fat-free mass, total body water mass, alcohol intake frequency, and coffee intake, and selected health outcome datasets: asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Datasets were assessed and filtered using R, followed by a two-sample Mendelian randomization analysis. The MR Egger, weighted median, inverse variance weighted, simple mode, and weighted mode methods were used to examine the association between exposures and outcomes. Heterogeneity and pleiotropy analyses were used to evaluate the reliability of results. Additionally, SNPnexus was used to ascertain SNPs linked to established phenotypes, while SNP annotation was obtained from the Ensembl BioMart database via the biomaRt package. Genes belonging to overlapping groups were visualized using ComplexHeatmap. Higher body fat percentage (OR = 1.72, 95% CI: 1.23-2.41, Show less