RATIONALE: Tuberculosis and HIV infection together form a highly mortal combination. Even after the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) medications, management for Tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS still remains a challenge. Poor outcomes (in both morbidity and mortality) are still being witnessed throughout the world, and especially in the poorly developed countries that bear the bulk of the burden of the cases.
It is assumed that one of the major contributors to the poor outcomes is poor nutritional status resulting from the disease process itself, poverty and toxicity from medications being used to treat these diseases that substantially reduce appetite. An assessment of the role that nutritional status has on change in CD4 as a surrogate marker of disease progression is therefore of importance.
OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the role that nutritional supplementation has on change in CD4 in TB patients co-infected with HIV who are receiving standard care of treatment.
METHODS: Data from a randomized controlled trial of a Protein Calorie Supplement (PCS) were used. To assess the effect of randomization to a nutritional supplement, baseline characteristics were compared among the intervention and the control groups and confounder variables, such as age, BMI, baseline CD4, socioeconomic status, previous exposure to TB and compliance with HAART medication were analyzed and adjusted for in a model using multivariate linear regression.
RESULTS: 151 HIV-infected women with TB disease were enrolled; 72 received PCS while 79 did not. We found that the PCS intervention had no significant effect on change in CD4 between baseline and 8 months. Average change in CD4 count was similar for intervention and control groups (204 vs. 207 units). This similarity persisted after adjusting for baseline BMI and previous TB disease.
CONCLUSION: Randomization (i.e. nutritional supplement) did not have a significant effect on change in CD4 count among study participants. However, an effect could have been masked by high compliance with ART.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/20864 |
| Date | 11 March 2017 |
| Creators | Magohe, Albert Katana |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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