Ventricular tachycardia in a disseminated MDR-TB patient: a case report and brief review of literature

Abstract

Although significant breakthroughs have been achieved in tuberculosis management, we still encounter numerous difficulties in diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Additionally, a new challenge, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) with unspecific clinical presentation, often results in delayed diagnosis. In this paper, we reported a case of disseminated tuberculosis with rare presentation of ventricular fibrillation, which proved resistant to both isoniazid and rifampicin. A review of literature showed that ventricular fibrillation or tachycardia in tuberculosis patients with pericarditis or myocarditis has been sporadically reported in the past, but none has been conducted involving patients with MDR-TB infections.

Keywords

tuberculosis / MDR-TB / ventricular tachycardia

References

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Acknowledgements

We thank the patient and her parents for their permission to share the successful diagnosis and treatment of severe disseminated MDR-TB presenting ventricular fibrillation with the readers. We thank Drs. Chen Ma and Li Ming Zhang for their help in the collection of medical data, as well as Fang Li and Binbin Li for their help in obtaining sputum smear and culture of M. tuberculosis. This work was supported by a grant for New Century Excellent Talents in University [NCET-09-0006] for Dr. Bin Cao.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Hui Li, Ran Li, Jiuxin Qu, Xiaomin Yu, Zhixin Cao, Yingmei Liu, and Bin Cao declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Informed consent was obtained from the patient for inclusion in this study.

Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11684-014-0321-7 and is accessible for authorized users.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg