Table 2 Risk behaviours associated with HIV/HCV Co-infection among PWID
From: HIV among people who inject drugs in India: a systematic review
Author/Year | Geographical location | No. of participants/Age | Study Design | Sampling strategy | Population Characteristics | HIV /HCV Coinfection | Sociodemographic factors | Injecting risk factors | Sexual risk factors | Study Strengths | Study Limitations | Quality Assessment Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ray Saraswati et al. (2015) [30] | Delhi | n = 3792 Aged 18 years and above | Longitudinal cohort study | Mapping exercise of hot spot area was done and participants were recruited through peer-referral and targeted outreach by outreach workers | Injecting in the past 3 months of data collection | Male- 449 | Older age, illiterate, never married, Hindu religion, living at home with family or either living on the street, geographical location | Longer duration of injection (2-5yrs), a greater number of days injected in the past month (21–30 days), sharing needles/syringe, sharing of injecting equipment, using syringe filled by someone else | Not sexually active in the last 3 months | Large sample size which allowed for examining sociodemographic, injecting and sexual characteristics associated with strong statistical power and analysis and minimal recall bias | -Just two-thirds of participants returned for follow up -Low female participants hence they were removed from statistical analysis | 8 |
Kermode et al. (2014) | Manipur | n = 821 Aged 18 years and above | Cross-sectional study | Respondent driven sampling | Injecting at least once in the past 6 months of data collection | Male- 241 | Older age ≥ 30 yrs, illiterate, widowed, divorced or separated, being employed | Earlier age of first injection, longer duration of injecting, injecting at least once daily, sharing of injecting equipment, sharing of needle/syringe | - | RDS was used to recruit study participants | -Not possible to infer causation for outcome variables due to the nature of the study design - Social acceptability bias may have contributed to an under-estimate in the prevalence of unsafe injecting behaviour | 10 |
Mahanta et al. (2008) [9] | Nagaland and Mizoram | n = 398 Aged 15 years and over | Cross-sectional study | PWID who attended drop-in centers within a given time period were randomly recruited for the study | Injecting within past 6 months of data collection | Male- 34 | Older age ≥ 25 yrs, male gender, married | Use of heroin, longer duration of injecting, sharing injection containers | - | Pre-tested, pre-validated structured questionnaire was used | -Due to the random recruitment strategy the study findings are not representative of the PWID population of Nagaland and Mizoram -Temporality could not be established due to the cross-sectional nature of the study |  |