Depression amongst Patients with Pulmonary Tuberculosis: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Background: Co-morbidity between depression and tuberculosis is widespread and result in an upsurge in the morbidity and mortality. Objective: To evaluate depression among Pulmonary Tuberculosis Patients: Methodology: This Cross-Sectional Study was carried out at the Department of Pulmonology and Psychology Mardan Medical Complex/Bacha Khan Medical College, Mardan from January 2018 to August 2020 after taking the approval from the ethical committee of the institute.  Using the Rao soft sampling size calculator, the size of the sample that best represented the population of patients with pulmonary TB was calculated.  A sample size of 386 was determined to attend 95 % confidence interval with 5% margin of error. The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) was the tool utilized to gather data for this study. Following data collection, SPSS version 16 was used to clean, code, and input the data. Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric tests were used to determine how distinct variables differed from one another. Results: A total of 386 individuals were enrolled in this study out of which 180 (46.63%) were males and 206 (53.36%) were females. To determine the variances among different variables Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney (p ≥ 0.05) were accomplished. Significant difference between, duration of treatment (p=0.01), phase of treatment (p=0.03) and type of treatment (p=0.001) were detected. Moderate depression was observed among participants at baseline and had duration of therapy less than a month. However, no significant difference (p ≥ 0.05) among other demographic variables was detected.†Conclusion According to the current study, the majority of TB patients had depression of some kind. During the therapy's baseline period, this depression appeared more noticeable. Patients receiving directly observed therapy seemed to be sad because of the increasing cost load and stigma.