Bioengineer.org | TB Rarely Stays in the Lungs, Seven-Year Hospital Study Finds

10 October 2026

Bioengineer.org news story

TB has a reputation as a lung disease, but a sweeping seven-year study from one of Europe’s leading infectious disease hospitals is challenging that picture in a way that could change how doctors everywhere hunt for the infection. Researchers at the National Institute for Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani in Rome, Italy analyzed the records of 2,085 adults hospitalized with TB between 2018 and 2024, and found that nearly a third of them, 632 patients or 30.3 percent, had extrapulmonary TB, meaning the bacterium had spread beyond the lungs to other organs and tissues. What surprised the team most was not how common the extrapulmonary form was, but how rarely it appeared alone. In 91.8 percent of those cases, patients also carried concurrent pulmonary disease, and only 8.2 percent had truly isolated extrapulmonary TB with no detectable lung involvement at all.

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Source: Bioengineer.org