Changing Antiretroviral Eligibility Criteria

Changing Antiretroviral Eligibility Criteria: Impact on the Number and Proportion of Adults Requiring Treatment in Swaziland.

OBJECTIVE Early initiation of antiretroviral treatment (ART) at CD4 cell count ≥ 500 cells per microliter reduces morbidity and mortality in HIV-infected adults. We determined the proportion of HIV-infected people with high viral load (VL) for whom transmission prevention would be an additional benefit of early treatment. DESIGN A randomly selected subset of a nationally representative sample...

Epilepsy surgery: eligibility criteria and presurgical evaluation

Epilepsy surgery has benefited from major advances during the last 20 years, thanks to the development of neuroimaging and long-term video-electroencephalographic (EEG) monitoring. However, it remains the case that only a small minority of potential epilepsy surgery candidates will have access to a comprehensive presurgical evaluation. Furthermore, this subset of patients are operated on after ...

Medical-eligibility criteria for contraceptive use.

Patterns of Clinical Trial Eligibility Criteria

Medical research would benefit from automatic methods that support eligibility evaluation for patient enrollment in clinical trials and design of eligibility criteria. In this study we addressed the problem of formalizing eligibility criteria. By analyzing a large set of breast cancer clinical trials we derived a set of patterns, that capture typical structure of conditions, pertaining to synta...

CD4 testing at clinics to assess eligibility for antiretroviral therapy.

BACKGROUND In 2011, the Ministry of Health raised the CD4 threshold for antiretroviral therapy (ART) eligibility from <250 cells/µl and <350 cells/µl, but at the same time only 8.8% of facilities in Malawi with HIV services provided CD4 testing. We conducted a record review at 10 rural clinics in Thyolo District to assess the impact of introducing CD4 testing on identifying patients eligible fo...