Insidious clinical course and ambiguous manifestations of spinal TB often delay and hinder the accuracy of diagnosis of spinal TB. In addition to pyogenic osteomyelitis, spinal TB should be included in the differential diagnosis especially in elderly patients with chronic back pain accompanied by elevated erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and those living in the TB endemic area.
TB spondylitis was found to occur in older patients. Spoligotyping results showed that most of the TB spondylitis cases were caused by non-Beijing type Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
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