The nature of tuberculosis multimorbidity and ​ its impact on mortality in South African adults

Speaker: Dr Greta K Wood is an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow in Infectious Diseases working to understand the nature of multimorbidity in TB and the impact on mortality and transmission. Her broader research interests include precision medicine for infectious diseases and infection neuroscience. She is supervised by Dr Tom Wingfield, Prof Peter MacPherson and Dr Eve Worrall within LSTM and University of Liverpool and is collaborating with Prof Neil Martinson, Director of the Perinatal HIV Research Unit (PHRU), Wits University, South Africa.

Topic: In 2020, diabetes, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), disorders due to alcohol use, tobacco smoking and undernutrition were estimated to account for 4.5 million (45%) new and relapse TB episodes globally [WHO, 2022]. In South Africa, the leading cause of death from 2016-2018 was TB, but this was superseded by diabetes in 2019. Addressing multimorbidity is essential for ending the TB epidemic. There is an urgent need to develop equitable, people-centred and impactful interventions for TB multimorbidity. In this work, we characterise the nature of multimorbidity in 1997 adults with TB and determine the impact on 15-month all-cause mortality, laying the foundation for evidence-based intervention.