Year: 2008
Type: letter
Abstract: To the Editor—We thank Colebunders and Caluwaerts [1] for their interest in the recent analysis by The Antiretroviral Therapy in Low-Income Countries Collaboration of the International epidemiological Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) and The ART Cohort Collaboration [2]. In this collaborative study, we compared the incidence rates of tuberculosis (TB) among patients receiving HAART in low-income and high-income countries. Colebunders and Caluwaerts ask whether the analysis included patients who were receiving treatment for TB at the start of HAART and argue that, if so, this might have biased the incidence rates of TB downward in lower-income countries and might have distorted the incidence-rate ratios during the first year of HAART. As Caluwaerts and Colebunders [1] suspected, data on treatment for TB at the time of initiation of HAART were not available for all the cohorts from low-income countries. But note that, as we pointed out in our report [2], the main objective of the analysis was not to estimate absolute rates but was to compare relative changes in rates of TB during the first year of HAART in low-income and high-income settings. The incidence rates obtained in such an analysis of data from 15 different sites were a weighted average of site-specific rates, influenced by variation in background rates and diagnostic procedures, and are not applicable to any specific setting.
Source: Clinical Infectious Diseases
DOI: 10.1086/587183
Authors: Martin W. G. Brinkhof, Matthias Egger
Institution: University of Bern
Language: English
Subfield: Infectious Diseases
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: University of Bern
OpenAlex ID: W1966206017