Sara N. LevintowUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillApproval & CommercializationYesJohns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public HealthCenters for Disease Control and PreventionOral PresentationUNC Project VietnamR&D
Estimating the Effect of Depression on HIV Transmission Risk Behaviors Among People Who Inject Drugs in Vietnam: A Causal Approach.
Estimating the Effect of Depression on HIV Transmission Risk Behaviors Among People Who Inject Drugs in Vietnam: A Causal Approach
Challenge
Among people who inject drugs in Vietnam—where depression is highly prevalent and HIV incidence remains elevated—the causal effect of depression on injection equipment sharing and sexual risk behaviors had not been estimated using modern causal inference methods.
Solution
Target RWE researchers and UNC/CDC collaborators applied marginal structural models and causal inference methods to longitudinal data from 455 PWID living with HIV in Vietnam to estimate the causal effect of depressive symptoms on risk behaviors over time.