Five Years Survival Trend and Outcome among HIV Infected Children Followed Up in the Pediatric Department in a Tertiary Hospital

Abstract

Background: HIV infection still contributes significantly to high leatlity among infant and child. The aim of this work was to assess survival rate after five years of routine follow up among HIV 1-infected children in the pediatric ward of the Parakou Teaching Hospital. Patients and methods: It was a descriptive cohort study with analytical purpose covering Five years from 2011 to 2016. It focused on 89 HIV 1-infected children. Kaplan-Meier method was used to estimate the survival probabilities. The survival trends were compared with Log-rank test. Cox regression test was used to identify factors associated with child deaths. Results: The HIV1-infected children had an average age of 3 years at admission. Most of children were on first line ART and most complications were malnutrition, pneumonia, pulmonary tuberculosis and oral candidosis. The probability of survival at 60 months was 0.7637. Factors associated with their deaths were the lack of children occupation (p = 0.039); 4th WHO clinical stage (p < 0.001) with 39 fold higher risk than children at WHO clinical stage 1; poor follow-up (p = 0.007) with 5.86 times fold higher risk than children with good follow up and malnutrition (p = 0.003) with 4.92 times fold higher risk than children with normal Z score. Conclusion: This result will help clinicians to improve the survival rate of infected children through systematic screening at each contact with the health system, a rapid care of children at birth and regularity in children’s follow-up monitoring with therapeutic education.