The 10-year trend of TB rate in West Azerbaijan Province,Iran from 2001 to 2010

Background: the present study aimed to explore some risk factors affected the mean of the number of tuberculosis (tb) in west azerbaijan province,iran between 2001 and 2010. methods: our time series study analyzed the data of 2,560 tb patients as registered with tb patients care system in west azerbaijan province from early 2001 to 2010. a checklist was prepared for collecting the data and they were then analyzed in spss v.16 software. results: the percentage of male and percentage of female were close to each other (52.2% against 47.8%,respective-ly). a significant increasing trend of tb rate was found over the years of 2001and 2010 with a pick at 2008 (p<0.001). a poisson log-linear analysis showed that the most important risk factor of the trend of rate was the level of education so that people with primary level or with illiterate level had a statistically significant tb rate of 5.21 (4.66-5.81),adjust-ed for years. the next risk factor was type of tb and place of residency,i.e.,pulmonary tb cases had higher rate than external pulmonary tb cases (rr=1.67; (1.54-1.80). the last factor with the lowest risk was bcg with rr=1.29 (1.20-1.40) for people who received bcg compared to the people who had not received it. conclusion: although the co morbidity of aids and tb was not a major problem,it is necessary that special atten-tion be paid to the way of implementing the tb control program based on the demographic risk factors of the study population.