Tuberculosis and diabetes: probabilistic linkage of databases to study the association between both diseases.

OBJECTIVE

to describe the profile of cases of tuberculosis and diabetes comorbidity in Brazil.

METHODS

this is a descriptive study with data from the Brazilian Information System for Notifiable Diseases - tuberculosis (Sinan-TB) and from the System of Registration and Monitoring of Hypertension and Diabetes Mellitus (Hiperdia), from 2007 to 2011; probabilistic linkage was carried out with Reclink software.

RESULTS

24,443 cases of comorbidity were found, including 3,181 cases not registered on Sinan-TB; of the total number of recovered cases, mostly were males (57.2%), aged 40-59 years (52.3%), black/brown-skinned (68.4%), with five to eight years of schooling (78.4%), with no regular use of alcohol (86.5%) and negative serology for the HIV virus (91.8%).

CONCLUSION

the cases found had similar profile to those registered on Sinan-TB and the probabilistic linkage of data from different information systems enabled the detection of cases not captured by surveillance.