International Mentored Scientist Award

The use of family planning has been shown to have strong potential to reduce new HIV infections due to unwanted fertility in Uganda. Most prevention of mother to child transmission PMTCT efforts to date have prioritized the provision of antiretroviral prophylaxis to HIV infected pregnant women, leaving voluntary contraception an underutilized approach despite evidence that preventing unintended pregnancies in the HIV infected women is an effective strategy for reducing HIV positive births and is cost effective. Therefore it is important to determine factors associated with the use of family planning in order to initiate ways to increase its use. We will conduct a retrospective study of information collected from initial and subsequent quarterly clinical visits made by adult females attending a 6000 person HIV/AIDS clinic at Mbarara University Teaching Hospital from 2007 through 2010. We will utilize an electronic clinical data base that has been in operation since 2007. We will estimate the proportion of women of reproductive age using several family planning methods, and use longitudinal data analysis methods to examine the association between family planning use and HIV status disclosure to sexual partner(s) and several other variables, such as age, marital status, HIV stage, and alcohol use over successive clinic visits. The information from this study will be used to plan strategies to enhance family planning uptake among HIV infected women to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV. Dr. Winnie Muyindike, Director, Immune Suppression Syndrome (ISS) Clinic, Mbarara University of Science and Technology National Referral Hospital, will lead this analysis under the mentorship of Dr. Judy Hahn.