TB in women: Weill Cornell's collaboration with BJ Government Medical College (Pune, India), by Jyoti Mathad

One in five women worldwide carries latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI), and 3 million are diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB) each year. Of the nearly 800,000 Indian women diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB) every year, 70% are in their reproductive years, between the ages of 18 and 45 years. The current challenges are to determine why women are more vulnerable than men during this time of their lives and to find a way to protect them. Working in India for the past 10 years, Dr. Mathad has been a pioneer in understanding the immunologic mechanism behind this increased risk of TB in the peripartum period.

In this lecture she will discuss the results of the PRACHITi study, an NIH-funded longitudinal study of 234 HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected pregnant women with latent TB infection in Pune, India. She will present data on how the immunologic changes of pregnancy intersect with those of TB and HIV, as well as data on important cofactors such as household air pollution and gestational diabetes, that may further exacerbate the risk of developing active TB. Dr. Mathad’s work in India has inspired her academic career dedicated to maternal-child health in resource-poor settings through clinical and translational research. Her research utilizes recent advancements in TB diagnostics and therapeutics to improve the lives of pregnant women and children globally.

Dr. Jyoti Mathad is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Obstetrics & Gynecology in the Center for Global Health at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her primary research interests include the immune changes of pregnancy and how they affect the development of tuberculosis (TB) in TB-endemic countries, such as India. Since 2010, she has been conducting research in Pune, India, on the performance of immune-based latent TB diagnostics in pregnant women with and without HIV. She is now leading the PRACHITi study there, which is investigating the impact of pregnancy and HIV on the immune response to M. tuberculosis. Her NIH-K23 award focuses on identifying behavioral and immunologic risk factors that predict which women are at highest risk of developing active TB postpartum.  She is also an investigator in the International Maternal, Pediatric, and Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials network (IMPAACT). Dr. Mathad completed her undergraduate studies in biology at Cornell University and received her medical degree from Albany Medical College. She completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Maryland, where she was chief resident. She returned to New York to complete her fellowship in infectious diseases at Weill Cornell, where she also completed her masters in clinical epidemiology.