Exploring the elevation in mortality among people with HIV

Understanding advances in the care and treatment of adults with HIV and gaps in clinical care requires monitoring differences in mortality between people entering care for HIV and the general population. We combine HIV cohort data with vital statistics information for the general US population to compare mortality for people living with HIV over the 5 years after entry into HIV care with their expected mortality, had they been subject to the same covariate-conditional mortality risks as the general US population. We also examine whether this elevation in mortality would persist under a strategy to provide universal early treatment with antiretroviral therapy.

Presenter: Jess Edwards is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on developing and applying quantitative methods to inform public health decisions using imperfect data. Her methodologic work centers on developing approaches to account for measurement error and informative missing data such that data collected for non-research purposes (e.g., electronic medical records, surveillance data, and programmatic data) may be used for causal inference. Substantively, she is focused on estimating the effects of interventions on the continuum of HIV medical care in the US, the Dominican Republic, and East Africa.