Source
British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, St Paul's Hospital, Vancouver, BC, Canada. ewood@cfenet.ubc.ca
Abstract
OBJECTIVES:
We examined the time to antiretroviral therapy (ART) use among antiretroviral naïve HIV infected injection drug users participating in a prospective cohort study in Vancouver, Canada.
METHODS:
Time to the initiation of ART was evaluated using Kaplan-Meier methods and Cox proportional hazards regression. The cohort was stratified based on Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal (primarily Caucasian) ethnicity.
RESULTS:
Between May 1996 and May 2003, 312 HIV-infected individuals were enrolled into the cohort. At 24 months after enrollment, the rate of ART use was 29.2% among Aboriginal participants and was 53.7% among non-Aboriginal participants (log-rank P=0.023), and lower uptake of ART persisted in multivariate analyses (relative hazard = 0.37 [95% CI: 0.15-0.93]; P = 0.035).
CONCLUSIONS:
These findings demonstrate lower uptake of HIV/AIDS care among Aboriginal injection drug users and demonstrate the need for interventions to improve access to HIV care among indigenous populations.