Pyrazinamide (PZA) is a key antituberculosis drug, yet no rapid susceptibility test is commercially available. PZA drug susceptibility testing (DST) was performed directly on sputum samples from 327 patients and compared with the indirect method by using the Bactec MGIT 960 system in the context of patient screening for participation in a drug trial. Compared to standard indirect PZA DST, direc...

Ordway et al. (8) have recently evaluated standard chemotherapy with a combination of rifampin, isoniazid, and pyrazinamide (PZA) in the guinea pig model of tuberculosis (TB) and described long-term bacterial persistence. Soon after the introduction of PZA in 1952, perhaps the most experienced group examining the activity of antituberculosis drugs in the guinea pig model reported that PZA had l...

BACKGROUND The ongoing epidemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Georgia highlights the need for more effective control strategies. A new regimen to treat MDR-TB that includes pyrazinamide (PZA) is currently being evaluated and PZA resistance status will largely influence the success of current and future treatment strategies. PZA susceptibility testing was not routinely performe...

BACKGROUND Pyrazinamide (PZA) plays an essential part in the shortened six-month tuberculosis (TB) treatment course due to its activity against slow-growing and non-replicating organisms. We tested whether PZA preferentially targets slow growing cells of Mycobacterium tuberculosis that could be representative of bacteria that remain after the initial kill with isoniazid (INH), by observing the ...

Pyrazinamide (PZA) is an important first-line anti-tuberculosis drug. But PZA susceptibility test is challenging because PZA activity is optimal only in an acid environment that inhibits the growth of M. tuberculosis. For current phenotypic methods, inconsistent results between different labs have been reported. Direct sequencing of pncA gene is being considered as an accurate predictor for PZA...

The variations in biochemical as well as molecular characteristics among several members of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex that are not M. tuberculosis have been assessed to facilitate an unambiguous species identification. Altogether, 96 M. tuberculosis complex strains including 52 M. bovis isolates and 44 M. africanum isolates were analyzed by spoligotyping. The strains could be clust...

Currently, the most effective tuberculosis control method involves case finding and 6 months of chemotherapy. There is a need to improve our understanding about drug interactions, combination activities, and the ability to remove persistent bacteria using the current regimens, particularly in relation to relapse. We aimed to investigate the therapeutic effects of three main components, rifampin...

from 1986-1989, sixteen patients suffering from tb meningitis aged 12-58, with csf smear or culture positive for mycobacterium tuberculosis were hospitalized and treated with rifampin (rif) , isoniazid (inh) , pyrazinamide (pza) and ethambutol (etb) for nine months. in all patients, etb and pza were withdrawn after three months and inh and rif were continued for the next six months. 81.2 percen...

A structural and spectroscopic analysis of the anti-tuberculosis drug pyrazinamide (PZA) was carried out. The PZA molecule was predicted theoretically to possess two conformers differing by internal rotation around the C-C( horizontal lineO) bond, with the E conformer (C(s) symmetry point group; N-C-C horizontal lineO dihedral: 180 degrees ) being ca. 30 kJ mol(-1) more stable than the Z form (...

BACKGROUND Low concentrations of anti-tuberculosis drugs are related to drug resistance and treatment failure. OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence of low plasma concentrations of anti-tuberculosis drugs. METHODS The study was performed among 60 pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in-patients at a tertiary care university-affiliated hospital in Tehran, Iran. Drug samples were drawn 2 and 6 h post ...