Tuberculosis infection in patients with dermatomyositis

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Authors
Patients with dermatomyositis (DM) are particularly susceptible to the development of opportunistic infections due to immunosuppression induced by the disease itself and its treatment. We describe three patients who met the diagnostic criteria for DM and developed tuberculous myositis. The first case, a 54-year-old woman, had a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for Mycobacterium tuberculosis detected in a post-mortem muscle biopsy. A second patient was diagnosed with a positive Ziehl-Neelsen stain in bronchoalveolar lavage, and a third patient, with multiple collections in the thorax and lower limbs, had positive Ziehl-Neelsen stain and PCR for Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In inflammatory myopathies, muscle and soft tissue infection by tuberculosis may produce symptoms similar to the underlying disease. The differential diagnosis of tuberculosis superinfection can be difficult.
How to Cite

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
PAGEPress has chosen to apply the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all manuscripts to be published.