• Saman Ayoubi, Jafar Aghajani, Poopak Farnia, Parissa Farnia, Jalaledin Ghanavi, and Ali Akbar Velayati.
• Mycobacteriology Research Center (MRC), National Research Institute of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (NRITLD), Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
• Arch Iran Med. 2020 Mar 1; 23 (3): 163-168.

BackgroundConsidering the importance of the increasing incidence of non-tuberculous mycobacteria, especially Mycobacterium abscessus worldwide, we conducted a study to evaluate the incidence of these diseases in our area. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of M. abscessus in patients with non-tuberculous mycobacteria.MethodsThis descriptive study was performed on 18,083 samples isolated from patients with non-tuberculous mycobacteria during 2011-2017 at the Mycobacteriology Research Center (MRC), Tehran, Iran. To identify the Mycobacterium species, a 439 bp fragment of the IS6110 gene was first amplified using primers TB1 and TB2. Samples with a negative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) result were analyzed to investigate non-tuberculosis mycobacteria (NTM), especially M. abscessus using the RFLP method.ResultsOf the 18,083 samples, 5513 (30.49%, 95% CI, 12.95) strains of Complex Tuberculosis and 236 (1.31%, 95% CI, 1.84) strains of NTM were identified. The mean age of the patients with NTM was 18 years, and most of them were male. The most commonly identified species in this study were M. abscessus type Ι 32 (13.56%, 95% CI, 18.36) and M. abscessus type II 13 (5.51%, 95%CI, 20.04).ConclusionIn this study, we observed a high prevalence of Mycobacterium abscessus type 1 in patients. As the treatment protocol for non-TB mycobacteria is different from M. abscessus complex, the diagnosis of these species as soon as possible will be significant for physicians.© 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

18 keywords...

hide…