Korean J Dermatol.  2001 Mar;39(3):318-322.

The Change of Bacillary Index during WHO Standard Multi-drug Therapy in Multi-bacillary Leprosy: Among the patients in The National Sorokdo Hospital

• Lee JH
• Kim DH
• Choi SW
• Kim HO
• Chae GT
• Kim TY

Abstract

BACKGROUND: There were no effective methods to monitor the treatment of leprosy. Anti-PGL-1 ELISA test and polymerase chain reaction(PCR) were used for monitoring the treatment, however many restrictions have been found to apply to those methods in the field. Bacillary index(BI) is a popular and not an expensive method. For this reason, the exact data to assess the efficacy of the standard multi-drug therapy(MDT) with BI is required for evaluation of the treatment in Korea.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to clarify the change of bacillary index during MDT in multi-bacillary leprosy(MB) cases.
METHODS
A total of 72 patients in the National Sorokdo Hospital were included in this study. With the retrospective method, BI, type of leprosy, relapse, age, and duration of treatment were evaluated.
RESULTS
The results were as follows; 1.In this study, the mean duration of BI changing from 6 to 5 was 5.7 months, from 5 to 4 was 6.6 months, from 4 to 3 was 13.1 months, from 3 to 2 was 13.8 months, from 2 to 1 was 12.4 months, from 1 to 0 was 29.4 months. 2.The time of initial change of BI after MDT were as follows: within 3 months(26.4%), 4-6 months(29.2%), 7-12 months(26.4%), 13-18 months(8.3%), 19-24 months(4.2%), 25-48 months(5.5%). The mean duration was 8.9 months. 3.The mean cumulative time of BI to 0 was 68.4 months
CONCLUSION
These results suggest that after MDT, in most of MB, BI decreased within one year and it took 68.4 months for BI to be 0. At first, BI decreased relatively fast, however a longer period was required to become a state of BI 0.

Keyword

Bacillary index(BI); Leprosy; Multi-drug therapy(MDT)

MeSH Terms

Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay
Humans
Korea
Leprosy*
Recurrence
Retrospective Studies