Grant Seeks to Improve HIV Care

The National Institutes of Health awarded a $9.4 million grant to an observational study in Central Africa to help improve clinical and health care for HIV patients.

Researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System, in collaboration with the City University of New York, are partnering with health officials from Cameroon, Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to collect data from electronic medical records of children and adults with HIV undergoing antiretroviral therapy (ART), reported Healio.

The data collected from the Central Africa International Epidemiologic Databases to Evaluate AIDS (CA-leDEA) study will be transferred to an external database for analysis.

“Over the next 5 years, we will use out high-quality data to address scientific clinical and health care delivery questions that will inform care in Central Africa and beyond,” said lead study investigator Kathy Anastos, MD in the report. “During our first 5 years leading CA-leDEA, we built the research capacity and technical infrastructure for tackling this enormous project.”

For the study, researchers are planning to increase the amount of clinical sites involved in the research from 15 to 20, and also expand the work of CA-leDEA to rural areas in Africa, as reported by Healio.

“Through leDEA, we are also learning about the ability of HIV clinical sites to diagnose and manage other chronic conditions, such as hypertension, diabetes, and mental illness,” said CA-leDEA researcher Denis Nash in the report. “This is very cutting-edge work, with relevance to health systems in Central Africa and beyond. The leDEA project is helping us learn more about the models and approaches to HIV care delivery at scale that result in optimal clinical outcomes, such a long-term retention in care and survival.”