AUTHOR=Anulo Asfaw , Girma Addisu , Tesfaye Gezahegn , Asefa Fekede , Cheru Abera , Lonsako Arega Abebe 

TITLE=Incidence and predictors of loss to follow-up among adult patients receiving antiretroviral therapy in Central Ethiopia: a multi-center retrospective cohort study

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1374515

DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2024.1374515

ISSN=2296-2565

ABSTRACT=Background: Globally, loss to follow-up (LTFU) remains a significant public health concern despite the rapid expansion of antiretroviral medication programs. It is a significant cause for treatment failure and threatens the enhancement of HIV treatment outcomes among patients on ART. However, there is a paucity of evidence on its incidence and predictors in Ethiopia. Thus, this study aimed to examine the incidence and predictors of LTFU among adult HIV patients receiving ART at hospitals in central Ethiopia.: A multi-centered facility-based retrospective cohort study was conducted among 432 randomly selected adult patients who received antiretroviral therapy. Data were entered into Epi data version 3.1 and exported to Stata version 14 for analysis. The Kaplan-Meier failure function was employed to determine the overall failure estimates and log rank test were used to compare the probability of failure among different category of variables. The Cox proportional hazard model was used to identify independent predictors of LTFU.Results: Overall 172 (39.8%) of study participants were LTFU over the 10-year follow up period with an incidence rate of 8.12 (95% CI:7.11,9.09) per 1,000 person-months. Undisclosed HIV