The Keith Edward scoring system: A case control study.
OBJECTIVE
The World health organization (WHO) has accepted Keith Edward scoring system for the diagnosis of childhood tuberculosis (TB). In the present study, we evaluated this scoring system.


RESULTS
We included 53 children with confirmed TB involving different organs, admitted in NB Medical College, during two years period as cases; and 50 randomly selected, age, sex, and organ matched confirmed non-TB cases as controls. We noticed 15.1% false negative and 22% false positive results in our study, and the scoring system had 84.9% sensitivity, 78% specificity, and 80.36% positive predictive value. Likelihood ratio positive (LR+) was 3.86, likelihood ratio negative (LR-) was 0.19, and overall agreement was 81.55%. We observed that Keith Edward scoring system was less effective in children suffering from non-TB chronic diseases (false positive rate: 45.5%). We found no significant difference in nutritional status between study and control groups (P = 0.65). We noticed that more than 15-mm indurations for tuberculin test were specific for TB in children.


CONCLUSIONS
We concluded that Keith Edward scoring system is good for public health purpose, but there is a scope for improvement, and further study is required for this purpose.
Sarkar
Supriya
S
Department of Chest Medicine, Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College, Kolkata, India.
Paul
Dilip Kumar
DK
Chakrabarti
Sudipta
S
Mandal
Nirmal Kumar
NK
Ghoshal
A G
AG