Global Survey on Nontuberculous Mycobacteria Pulmonary Disease (NTM-PD): Clinical Insights

Rationale: In clinics, NTM-PD diagnosis is typically established by applying the 2007 ATS/IDSA and 2020 ATS/ERS/ESCMID/IDSA criteria across clinical, radiological, and microbiological domains while excluding alternative diagnoses. However, cohort data suggest many culture-positive patients do not meet all domains, and real-world testing and adherence vary widely.

Objectives:

1. To assess how interpretable and applicable clinicians find the NTM-PD diagnostic criteria in day-to-day practice.
2. To estimate indirectly what proportion of patients with at least one respiratory NTM isolate are perceived to eventually fulfil all diagnostic domains.
3. To explore how clinicians re-weight the diagnostic domains in the presence or absence of structural lung disease, and across different resource/TB-burden settings.
4. To understand when clinicians decide to start or withhold treatment, and what contextual factors drive these decisions.

Survey description: The survey takes around 15–20 minutes to complete.

Features:

1. Can save and resume later. Watch tutorial (1 min) by pressing this link -->   /upload/surveys/475611/files/Tutorial.mp4
2. Available in 12 languages (Arabic, Chinese [simplified], Chinese [traditional], Dutch, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese).
3. Can go back and forth in the survey.
4. Divided into 6 smaller sections for easier navigation; you can toggle between sections.

Target respondents: All physicians dealing with patients with pulmonary NTM.

Lead study contact: Nityanand Jain, MD. Laboratory of Respiratory Diseases and Thoracic Surgery, KU Leuven, Belgium. Email: nityanand.jain@kuleuven.be.

Study supervisors and advisory board members

• Natalie Lorent, UZ / KU Leuven, Belgium
• Liga Kuksa, WHO Collaborating Center on Research and Training in MDR-TB, Latvia
• Theodore K. Marras, University of Toronto and University Health Network, Canada
• Kozo Morimoto, Fukujuji Hospital, Japan Anti-Tuberculosis Association, Japan
• Mateja Janković Makek, University Hospital Center Zagreb, Croatia
• Rachel Thomson, University of Queensland, Australia
• Saskia Janssen, TASK, Cape Town, South Africa

Study dissemination partners

Consent Notice

By proceeding further, you consent to participate in this study. By agreeing to participate, you also consent to the publication of aggregated results and any direct quotes you choose to provide. When publishing verbatim responses, we will not identify individual respondents; pseudonymized identifiers will be used instead.