A novel approach to accounting for loss to follow-up when estimating the relationship between CD4 Count at ART initiation and mortality.

ABSTRACT:

Background

While CD4 strongly predicts mortality on antiretroviral therapy (ART), estimates from programmatic data suffer from incomplete patient outcomes.

Methods

We conducted a pooled analysis of one-year mortality data on ART accounting for lost patients. We identified articles reporting one-year mortality by ART initiation CD4 count. We estimated the average mortality among those lost as the value that maximizes the fit of a regression of the natural log of mortality on the natural log of the imputed mean CD4 count in each band.

Results

We found 20 studies representing 64,426 subjects and 51 CD4 observations. Without correcting for losses, one-year mortality was >4.8% for all CD4 counts <200 cells/mm(3). When searching over different values for mortality among tho

SUBMITTER: Fox M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3728360 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature