The study, led by Associate Professor Catherine Ong Wei Min, Principal Investigator of the Infectious Diseases Translational Research Program at NUS Medicine, together with co-lead authors Dr. Poh Xuan Ying and Dr. Loh Fei Kean, who are from the same program, studied the prognostic factors of CNS-TB.

They analyzed cerebrospinal fluid samples collected from 72 children with tuberculous meningitis and control patients and found elevated levels of tissue-damaging matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) proteins and immune cell traps known as neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), which drives the severity of CNS-TB, in the cerebrospinal fluid of children with CNS-TB.

While TB is generally associated with pulmonary TB which affects the lungs, CNS-TB is a more severe form of TB that affects the brain and spinal cord and occurs more commonly among children and the immunocompromised.