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Abstract
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Objective: Tuberculosis (TB) remains a leading infectious disease in Taiwan. Contacts of TB are known to be at risk of acquiring infection and developing disease. The study aimed to investigate the disease and infection rate of TB contacts, and its implication of public health policy implementation.
Method: We obtained 16,321 TB cases and 35,044 contacts from the national TB registry database since year of 2005 in Taiwan. The contact database was then matched with notification of TB for the years of 2005 to 2007, following for development of TB in contacts. Cox proportional hazard model was used to study the risk factors.
Result: An average of approximately 3 contacts was found for each TB case, and 93% of the contacts were examined. In follow up period, of 495 contacts were development of TB, among those, 46% (229 cases) contacts were diagnosed in contact investigation by health authorities. The contacts TB rate in first year is the highest 1,015/100,000；following by 304 and 155 for second to third years. 26% of children aged less than 12 years had positive TB reactions. The significant variables of predicting disease were the elder, male, infectious of index case, household contact, living in aboriginal areas in Cox proportional hazard models.
Conclusion: In Taiwan, contact investigation is effective and useful for active case finding. Systematic assessment of screening program for efficacy and outcome and needed to be done for good public health practice.
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Abstract
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Objective: To examine the association of obesity indexes (including body mass index [BMI], waist circumference [WC], waist-to-hip ratio [WHR], and waist-to-height ratio [WHtR]) with gout and to compare the performance of obesity indexes to predict the risk of gout in Taiwanese men.
Methods: Data was analyzed from 1443 Taiwanese men who participated health examinations and age ≧ 20 years in the 1993-1996 Nutrition and Health Survey (NAHSIT, 1993-1996). We conducted four logistic models to determine the relationships between obesity indexes and gout. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to compare the predictive performance and to identify the optimal cut-off points, sensitivity, and specificity of obesity indexes for male gout.
Results: After controlling for the other coverables, multivariate logistic model showed the odds ratio for WHtR was 2.28 (95% CI: 1.35-3.86) and had a significant linear effect (p for trend = 0.03) in male gout. In ROC curve, the largest area under curve was founding WHtR (AUC: 0.684; 95 % CI: 0.639-0.729) and the optimal cut-off point of WHtR associated with the risk of gout in men was 0.57 (sensitivity and specificity was 67%, respectively).
Conclusions: WHtR is the best predictor for the risk of gout in Taiwanese.
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