Background: TB is disease that falls disproportionally in low income nation and the poor’s. Many
studies were available that assessed the Pre-treatment and treatment cost of TB but none of these
literature differentiates pre-diagnosis and diagnosis cost of TB. This study assessed both Pre-diagnosis
and Diagnosis cost of Tuberculosis.
Materials and Methods: An Institutional cross sectional study of all the patients (70) in intensive
phase of Urban-DOTS regimen were included in study. Microsoft Excel was used for data entry and
cleaning and analysis was done through SPSS version 16.0. P-value less than 0.05 were taken as the
cut-off values for Non- Parametric test of statistical significance between the variables.
Results: Of 70 patients, majority were male 46 (65.7%), non-migrants 36 (51.4%), non-poor
household member 39 (55.7%) and 55(76%) cope with household income and saving. The Median
Pre-diagnosis and Diagnosis cost was $ 74.61 (23.87 – 165.70) and $ 15.38 (5.20 – 187.50)
respectively. Total cost for the patients before initiation of DOTS regimen were associated with
household income group, diagnostic centre, number of health care provider, and coping mechanisms
(P < 0.05).