Effect of secondary preventive therapy on recurrence of tuberculosis in HIV-infected individuals: a systematic review

Abstract

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected individuals successfully treated for tuberculosis (TB) remain at risk of recurrence of the disease, especially in high TB incidence settings. We performed a systematic review, investigating whether secondary preventive therapy (sPT) with anti-TB drugs (preventive therapy in former TB patients with treatment success) is an effective strategy to prevent recurrence of TB in this patient group. We searched the databases PubMed, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, Web of Science and Google Scholar using the keywords HIV-infections, HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, AIDS, isoniazid, isoniazid preventive therapy (IPT), tuberculosis, TB, recurrence and recurrent disease, resulting in 253 potential publications. We identified eight publications for full text assessment, after which four articles qualified for inclusion in this systematic review. The quality of the included articles was rated using the GRADE system. All but one study were rated as having a high quality. In all included studies, sPT significantly decreased the incidence of recurrent TB in HIV-infected individuals to a substantial degree in comparison to non-treatment or placebo. Relative reductions varied from 55.0% to 82.1%. These data showed that the use of sPT to prevent recurrent TB in HIV-infected individuals was highly beneficial. These findings need to be confirmed in prospective studies with an adequate assessment of the effect of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and the occurrence of drug resistance.