CORRESPONDENCE

SIR—I read with interest the article by Verdon et al. [1] that reviewed 48 cases of tuberculous meningitis in adults. The authors indicated that 46 of 48 patients were treated with different regimens of antimicrobial chemotherapy. However, they did not elaborate on the rationale for choosing a specific drug schedule for a particular subgroup of patients or on the duration of treatment and its correla-tion with the outcome of disease. The duration of antituberculous chemotherapy has been shown to play an important role in the outcome of tuberculous meningitis as well as preventing the recurrence of this disease [2]. However, there are conflicting opinions regarding the optimal duration of drug therapy for tuberculous meningitis. Although some clinicians have recommended short-term chemotherapy [3, 4], others have suggested that long-term chemotherapy may be mandatory [2, 5]. As pointed out by Verdon et al., most of these studies have in-volved children, whereas their study involved adults [2-5]. There-fore, it would have been helpful if they had elaborated on and discussed the drug schedule they had used to treat 17 patients who were alive at 1 year. This information should enable physicians to select an appropriate drug regimen to treat adult patients in ad-vanced stages of tuberculous meningitis