{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pone.0264216","title":"Age-specific effectiveness of a tuberculosis screening intervention in children","abstract":"OBJECTIVE: To apply a cascade-of-care framework to evaluate the effectiveness-by age of the child-of an intensified tuberculosis patient-finding intervention. DESIGN: From a prospective screening program at four hospitals in Pakistan (2014-2016) we constructed a care cascade comprising six steps: screened, positive screen, evaluated, diagnosed, started treatment, and successful outcome. We evaluated the cascade by each year of age from 0 to 14 and report the age-specific mean proportion and standard deviation. RESULTS: On average across all ages, only 12.5% (standard deviation: 2.0%) of children with a positive screen were not evaluated. Among children who had a complete evaluation, the highest percentages of children diagnosed with tuberculosis were observed in children 0-4 (mean: 31.9%; standard deviation: 4.8%), followed by lower percentages in children 5-9 (mean: 22.4%; standard deviation: 2.2%), and 10-14 (mean: 26.0%; standard deviation:5.4%). Nearly all children diagnosed with tuberculosis initiated treatment, and an average of 93.3% (standard deviation: 3.3%) across all ages had successful treatment outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: This intervention was highly effective across ages 0-14 years. Our study illustrates the utility of applying operational analyses of age-stratified cascades to identify age-specific gaps in pediatric tuberculosis care that can guide future, novel interventions to close these gaps.","journal":"PLoS ONE","year":2022,"id":276323,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":8,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9023,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":875015,"name":"Melanie Dubois","orcid":"0000-0001-9972-8533","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":105798,"name":"Amyn A. Malik","orcid":"0000-0003-4875-9916","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":743733,"name":"Junaid Ahmed","orcid":"0000-0001-9419-0754","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":387408,"name":"Sara Siddiqui","orcid":"0000-0003-3942-1593","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":946465,"name":"Salman Khan","orcid":"0009-0004-3417-679X","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":946876,"name":"Manzoor Brohi","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":946877,"name":"Teerath Das Valecha","orcid":null,"position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":387410,"name":"Farhana Amanullah","orcid":"0000-0003-1168-4463","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":234305,"name":"Mercedes C. Becerra","orcid":null,"position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":387418,"name":"Hamidah Hussain","orcid":"0000-0002-6585-9815","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":392984,"name":"Meredith B. Brooks","orcid":"0000-0003-1022-2515","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":21,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:28:26.545826Z","pmid":"35180263","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}