NYMC Faculty Publications

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0169871

Journal Title

PLoS One

First Page

e0169871

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Department

Epidemiology and Community Health

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Despite the World Health Organization (WHO) regularly updating guidelines to recommend earlier initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in children, timely enrollment into care and initiation of ART in sub-Saharan Africa in children lags behind that of adults. The impact of implementing increasingly less restrictive ART guidelines on ART initiation in Central Africa has not been described. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data are from the Central Africa International Epidemiologic Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) pediatric cohort of 3,426 children (0-15 years) entering HIV care at 15 sites in Burundi, DRC, and Rwanda. Measures include CD4 count, WHO clinical stage, age, and weight-for-age Z score (WAZ), each at enrollment into HIV care and at ART initiation. Changes in the medians or proportions of each measure by year of enrollment and year of ART initiation were assessed to capture potential impacts of changing ART guidelines. RESULTS: Median age at care enrollment decreased from 77.2 months in 2004-05 to 30.3 months in 2012-13. The median age at ART initiation (n = 2058) decreased from 83.0 months in 2004-05 to 66.9 months in 2012-13. The proportion of children

Publisher's Statement

Originally published in PLoS One, 12 (1), e0169871. The original material can be found here.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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