AUTHOR=Andualem Belay Desyebelew , Ayele Birhanu Teshome 

TITLE=Progression of HIV Disease Among Patients on ART in Ethiopia: Application of Longitudinal Count Models

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2019

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2019.00415

DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2019.00415

ISSN=2296-2565

ABSTRACT=Although the world is fighting HIV disease in unity and patients are getting antiretroviral therapy3
treatment, HIV disease continues to be a serious health issue for some parts of the world. Large4
number of AIDS related deaths and co-morbidities are being registered every year in resource5
limited countries like Ethiopia. Most studies that have assessed the progression of the disease6
used models that require continuous response. The main objective of this study was to make7
use of appropriate statistical models to analyze routinely collected HIV data and identify risk8
factors associated with progression of CD4+ cell count of patients under ART treatment in Debre9
Markos Referral Hospital, Ethiopia. In this longitudinal retrospective study, routinely data of 44510
HIV patients registered for ART treatment in the Hospital was used. As overdispersion was11
detected in the data, Poisson-Gamma, Poisson-Normal, and Poisson-Gamma-Normal models12
were applied to account for overdispersion and correlation in the data. Poisson-Gamma-Normal13
model with random intercept was selected as the best model to fit the data. The findings of the14
study revealed time on treatment, sex of patients, baseline WHO stage and baseline CD4+ cell15
count as significant factors for progression of CD4+ cell count.