A recent study suggests that providing nutritional support to tuberculosis patients in India could significantly reduce the number of deaths caused by the disease. The research indicates that offering food baskets to the 2.8 million people affected by tuberculosis (TB) annually could prevent more than 120,000 deaths each year.
Pranay Sinha, assistant professor of medicine at Boston University’s school of medicine and an infectious disease physician at the Boston Medical Center, noted the cost-effectiveness of the intervention. (Sinha said, “For less than the cost of many biomedical interventions, we could prevent over 100,000 TB deaths a year.”) The study, conducted in collaboration with India’s National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme (NTEP), highlights the potential of food support to improve health outcomes for individuals with TB.
As per information available with TahirRihat.com, the findings, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Global Health, underscore the critical role of nutrition in combating TB. Undernutrition is identified as a major modifiable risk factor, contributing to immune suppression, treatment failure, and increased mortality among TB patients.
Urvashi Singh, former Deputy Director General of the NTEP, emphasized the fundamental connection between undernutrition and TB. (Singh said, “Undernutrition isn’t just a complication of TB — it’s one of its root causes. While we wait for effective vaccines for TB, food is the vaccine we already have, and providing food baskets to households affected by TB could be one of the most impactful things we do for TB elimination.”) The NTEP, formerly known as the Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP), aims to eliminate TB in India.
The study involved comparing standard care with a household-level nutritional food basket intervention, while also considering data from previously published research and systematic reviews. Researchers projected that nutritional support could avert 10,470 DALYs (disability-adjusted life years, representing years of poor health) per 10,000 persons with TB (PWTB). The authors estimated that scaling this intervention to cover India’s 2.8 million annual TB cases could prevent approximately 120,120 TB deaths nationwide.
The estimated cost per health gain was USD 141, which, according to the researchers, is significantly below India’s benchmark of USD 550, suggesting the intervention is a worthwhile investment. (Sinha stated, “What this study shows is that scaling up in-kind nutritional support in India isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s also an excellent investment.”) Julia Gallini, the study’s first author and a doctoral candidate in biostatistics at Boston University, highlighted the study’s impact on policy. (Gallini said, “This work bridges the gap between clinical evidence and policy. We wanted to give NTEP and global health policymakers a clear, quantitative picture of what nutritional support could achieve nationally. The numbers make a compelling case.”)
A previous study from August 2023, published in The Lancet, demonstrated that nutritional support involving proteins and multivitamins reduced new TB cases by almost half among family members of patients in India. This earlier research, known as the RATIONS trial, enrolled household contacts of 2,800 patients with confirmed TB across 28 TB units of the NTEP in four districts of Jharkhand. The aggregated data and findings advocate for prioritizing nutritional interventions as a critical component of TB control and elimination strategies in India.
Tahir Rihat (also known as Tahir Bilal) is an independent journalist, activist, and digital media professional from the Chenab Valley of Jammu and Kashmir, India. He is best known for his work as the Online Editor at The Chenab Times.