PMC:3216508 / 16364-17711 JSONTXT

{"project":"2_test","denotations":[{"id":"22355539-20019339-135382475","span":{"begin":687,"end":689},"obj":"20019339"}],"text":"Patients with different manifestations of active TB were recruited at clinics in the Shenzhen Third People's Hospital and Shenzhen Polytechnic College in Shenzhen, China. Healthy adults with no history of TB disease were also recruited as the control group. All participants had received bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination at birth. We used M. tuberculosis-specific IFN-γ enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISPOT) assay to exclude LTBI from healthy donors, and only those who were ELISPOT negative were selected as our healthy controls. The diagnosis of tuberculosis was based on mycobacterium tuberculosis examination, clinical symptoms, and chest X-ray examination as described before13. Samples collected before Feb., 2010 were used as our experimental cohort (479 cases and 358 controls) and samples collected after that date were used as our validation cohort (413 cases and 241 controls). The statistics of age distributions and male/female ratios are listed in Supplementary Table S3. The study obtained ethical approval from the Institutional Review Board of the Shenzhen Third People's Hospital, and informed written consent was obtained from all the patients. Clinical specimens from patients with TB were collected within one week after anti-TB treatment. Whole blood was collected by venipuncture from the populations mentioned above."}