STUDY COORDINATED BY CIBIO-InBIO RESEARCHER GABRIELA GOMES SHEDS NEW LIGHT ON INNOVATIVE STRATEGIES AGAINST TUBERCULOSIS

In what comes to tuberculosis, while it is well known that there are specific groups which show a much higher risk to acquire infection and develop disease than the majority of the population, this kind of individual heterogeneity is frequently overlooked in traditional methods used in epidemiological studies.

However, a new theoretical study coordinated by CIBIO-InBIO researcher Gabriela Gomes and recently published by BMC Infectious Diseases open access journal, a team of researchers used a hypothetical vaccine to illustrate how heterogeneity in individual disease risk can compromise the performance of control programmes. Adopting concepts from ecology and evolution, the researchers noticed that the pool of susceptible individuals is under cohort selection and evolves towards reduced risk when the intensity of transmission is high. Any intervention that reduces transmission has a conflicting effect of increasing susceptibility, which is not captured when heterogeneity is not represented in the analysis, resulting in overoptimistic impact predictions. Besides paving the way for optimization in analytical tools, the new quantitative framework is already being used to inform future interventions designed to reduce susceptibility, complementing the more conventional approach of reducing infectivity.

According to Gabriela Gomes, the susceptibility of individuals with higher risks of disease could be prevented by reinforcing social measures and not only medical care, since tuberculosis should be addressed in an integrated manner, having in mind a complex network of factors. These results provide a new perspective of this disease within the action framework of the World Health Organization.

To know more about this topic, please follow the link bellow:

“Para se combater a tuberculose também são precisas medidas sociais” | Público | Mar 24, 2016 (Information available in Portuguese)

To read the original article published by the BMC Infectious Diseases please, click here.

Figure Legend: "Impact of simulated vaccine decaying with the variance-to-mean ratio of disease risk. In all cases the vaccine is given to all individuals to halve susceptibility to infection and reduce reactivation rate by 90 %. Two epidemiological settings are considered: baseline incidence of 1000 per 100,000 person-years (red); and 50 per 100,000 person-years (grey)". In Gomes at al. 2016. BMC Infectious Diseases.