Malnutrition and Tuberculosis

Malnutrition and tuberculosis (TB) are both major problems in most of the developing countries in the world. These two problems interact with each other. Nutritional status is significantly lower in patients with active tuberculosis compared with healthy controls. Tuberculosis infection may lead to anorexia, nutrient malabsorption, micronutrient malabsorption, and altered metabolism causing muscle and fat mass wasting. Altered immune response because of malnutrition in tuberculosis infection could also occur. Tuberculosis co-infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and multi-drugs resistance tuberculosis (MDR-TB) further aggravates the problem. It has been found that malnourished tuberculosis patients have delayed recovery and higher mortality rates than well-nourished patients. Nutritional supplementation also believed to have improve the course of the disease during tuberculosis treatment but it has been shown that it might be heavily influenced by many factors i.e. organism, host and environmental