23 Mar 2024 • A new way to classify tuberculosis (TB) that aims to improve focus on the early stages of the disease has been presented by an international team involving researchers at UCL.

An international Delphi exercise involving 71 experts has unveiled the International Consensus for Early TB (ICE-TB) framework, challenging the traditional active-latent paradigm in tuberculosis.

The new framework, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, seeks to replace the approach of the last half century of defining TB as either active or latent - an approach researchers say is limiting progress in eradicating the disease.

Under the new classification, there are four disease states: clinical (with symptoms) and subclinical (without symptoms), with each of these classed as either infectious or non-infectious. The fifth state is M. tuberculosis infection that has not progressed to disease – that is, M tuberculosis may be present in the body and alive, but there are no signs of the disease that are visible to the naked eye, for example with imaging.

Source: The Lancet | Read full story