These are described in detail in the Methods section.
ReviewClinical diagnosis of smear-negative pulmonary tuberculosis in low-income countries: the current evidence
Section snippets
Methods
We identified relevant publications by searches of Medline, PubMed, Embase, HealthSTAR, and Web of Science with the keywords: “tuberculosis”, “Mycobacterium tuberculosis”, “sputum negative”, “smear negative”, AFB negative”, “negative for AFB”, “abacillary”, and “diagnosis” for papers published in English from 1966 onwards. We also searched for relevant articles in the contents tables of the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases for the past 10 years. We examined the reference
Results
We selected 15 studies that met the above criteria. Table 1 gives an outline of the studies and table 2 summarises the validity and clinical usefulness of each. Most studies validated diagnostic tools or criteria against sputum culture. However, several studies included in this review also used other less recognised methods of confirming the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis.
Search strategy and selection criteria
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