| dc.description.abstract | This study aimed at investigating factors associated with the survival of Uganda’s HIV/TB positive service men on TB treatment in the General Military Hospital (GMH), Bombo army barracks. The source of data was from the clinical and laboratory case reports in the files of patients at GMH between January 2009 to December 2011 sample size of 143 patients. The analysis was made using a time-to-event analysis based on the Kaplan-Meier estimate, the Log-rank Chi-square test and Cox-Proportional Hazard Model.
The results showed that the survival of the HIV/TB patients on treatment was overall low (most survived up to 20th weeks of the initiation of ART treatment). By area of residence, most of the servicemen treated at the GMH came from barracks found in rural areas (37.8%) followed by those in urban barracks (32.8%) while the least were those from the Peri urban barracks (29.4%). Majority of the patients on treatment in GMH were bed ridden.
The survival of the HIV patients in stage 1 and stage 2 was different from those at stage 3 and stage 4 who were at high risk of death compared to those in stages 1 and 2. The survival of the patients with low CD4 of ≤ 200 cell/𝑚�ㅤ3 was different from that of patients with high CD4 of 500cell/𝑚𝑚3, and those were at high risk of death compared to those with high CD4 of 200cell/𝑚𝑚3 ≤ 500cell/𝑚𝑚3. Patients who were bed ridden had lower chances of survival compared to those at working stage of Karnofsky. Furthermore, HIV infected TB patients who were drinking alcohol and were on ART and TB treatment had lower chances of survival compared to those who were not drinking alcohol.
Old age is associated with poor survival, whereas being male is associated with better survival. Patients who develop TB prior to start ART their mortality was high with increasing risk of death (52.5%) compared to those who develop TB while on ART (47.5%).
It is recommended that reduction of deaths among HIV/TB patients requires early screening, diagnosis, and faster treatment within 3 months to 8 months for TB infection especially for patients on antiretroviral therapy. | en_US |
