Introduction: Considering that prevoius investigation has included more adult age range, this study aimed to evaluate the agreement between TST and Quantiferon in kidney disease children who are candidate for immunosuppressive medications.

Methods: In this cross sectional study, 31 children with renal disease including nephrotic syndrome and renal transplant candidates nominated for immunosuppressive drugs were evaluated from the point of LTBI. These children underwere TST and QFT. Physical examination and chest x-ray was conducted in all patients who were positive for QFT or TST to rule out active TB. Finally, the data were entered into statistical software SPSS v. 16 and were analyzed.

Results: In this study, 31 children including 17 (54.8%) new case of nephrotic syndrome and 14 (45.2%) kidney transplant candidates with a mean age of 6.86 (SD= 4) years were evaluated from whom 10 (32.3%) were female and 21 (67.7%) were male. The average duration of nephrotic syndrome was 1.3(SD= 12.12) weeks. The average duration of ESRD in children undergoing kidney transplantation was 6.35 (SD= 2.83) years and the average duration of dialysis was 1.72 (SD= 1.25) years. QFT test was negative in all patients in both groups and PPD test was positive in 1 (5.9%) patients with nephrotic syndrome; the difference was not statistically significant (p Value = 0.35).

Conclusion: QFT test has a high negative predictive value as well as a high diagnostic accuracy compared with TST and thus QFT and TST have a similar diagnostic performance to assess TB, however due to lower cost-benefit of TST, this test is more preferred to QFT.