People with type 2 diabetes mellitus have a greater risk of developing pulmonary tuberculosis, said the researcher of the Nephrology Department of the General Hospital of Mexico Dr. Eduardo Liceaga, Lucia Monserrat Pérez Navarro.
The specialist indicated that because diabetes is hereditary, if a diabetic patient presents this comorbidity, the risk that some family member develop tuberculosis increases up to five times.
Therefore, diabetics would have to do a baciloscopy study, which is the diagnosis test of tuberculosis, recommended Pérez Navarro in an interview for the Informative Agency of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT).
He explained that because diabetes affects different organs and the immune system, it favors the development of other infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.
He commented that a study prepared by the Institute of Public Health of the Veracruz University in 2007 and of which he was part, which analyzed 565 patients with diabetes and tuberculosis, confirmed that diabetics have three times more risk of developing drug resistance.
The high levels of serum glucose can cause pharmacor resistance, that is, the process in which an infectious agent suffers a mutation and acquires resistance to an effective medication, he explained.
Therefore, Pérez Navarro considered that the treatment and intensive search for diabetic tuberculosis should be modified, since these patients can present up to one year tuberculosis without knowing it, since the symptoms associate them with diabetes problems.
"If we can detect before the patient has signs and symptoms, we will reduce the incidence of tuberculosis in diabetic patients," he said.
If it is considered that diabetes mellitus is increasingly frequent in Mexico and "it is becoming a serious health problem, in the future the control of tuberculosis will be very complicated," he added.