This investigation was designed to study the possible difference in the conversion speed and rate between SM administered daily (A) and twice weekly (B) groups treated by the combined regimen of SM, INH 0.3 g and PAS 10.0g. The patients were chosen from those admitted to the National Nakano Chest Hospital during the period from November 1969 to November 1971, and they had cavity and smear positive bacilli in their sputum. They had not been treated or only for less than 15 days previously.
These patients we r e allocated at random to these two groups. Drug sensitivity tests were done by Canetti's proportion method (Table 1). Criteria for sensitivity was under 1% to SM 4 mcg, INH 0.1 mcg and PAS 0.5 mcg: Exclusion and dropout cases were shown in Table 4. Background factors were almost the same between group A and group B (Fig.1).
There were no difference in the conversion speed rate between group A and group Bin all the cases which were treated with the same regimen for more than 6 months. These include the dropout cases after 6 months of treatment (Table 5), and cases treated throughout one year (Table 6 and Fig.2). There was no difference in the results presented in Table 5 and Table 6.
The results in group A and group B were the same in far advanced cases as well as in moderately advanced cases (Table 7, 8), but the speed of conversion was slightly faster in the moderately advanced cases comparing with that of far advanced cases (Fig.3).
Most of the cases converted to negative before 6 months from the b e ginning of the triple therapy. The cases which converted after 6 months and the relapse cases were illustrated in Tables 9 and 10. There were 4 cases of relapse from group A and 2 from group B.
Auditory disorders were studied in particular as side-effects. Up to now, 9 c a ses (7.2%) in group A showed a drop of hearing while only 3 (2.4%) were recognized in group B (Table 11). Concerning auditory disorder, however, we do not like to give definite conclusions until the results of further detailed studies are obtained.
In conclusion, our studies showed no advantage in the conversion speed and rate with the use of daily SM compared with SM twice weekly in the regimen of SM, INH and PAS. Moreover, the results were absolutely the same even in far advanced cases (Table 7).
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