Efficacy and Safety of Vitamin D Supplementation For Pulmonary Tuberculosis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: vitamin d might be promising to serve as an adjunctive therapy for pulmonary tuberculosis (tb). however, the results remained controversial. we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy and safety of vitamin d in patients with pulmonary tb. methods: medline, scopus, google scholar, embase, springer, and science direct were searched electroni-cally from inception to oct 2016. randomized controlled trials (rcts) and controlled clinical trials (ccts) as-sessing the effect of vitamin d plus anti-tuberculosis treatment (att) versus placebo plus att on the treat-ment of pulmonary tb were included. two investigators independently searched articles, extracted data, and assessed the quality of included studies. data were analyzed using revman 5.3 software. results: five studies were included in this meta-analysis. overall, compared with placebo intervention, vitamin d supplementation was found to have no significant effect on sputum smear negative conversion rates (rr=0.99; 95% ci=0.91 to 1.07; p=0.77), bmi (md=0.11; 95% ci=-0.85 to 1.07; p=0.82) and esr (md=-2.29; 95% ci=-8.87 to 4.30; p=0.50). conclusion: vitamin d supplementation showed no influence on the improvement of sputum smear-negative conversion rates and bmi, as well as the decrease in esr.