The effects of HIV self-testing on the uptake of HIV testing and linkage to antiretroviral treatment among adults in Africa: a systematic review protocol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: HIV is still a global public health problem. More than 75 % of HIV-infected people are in Africa, and most of them are unaware of their HIV status, which is a barrier to accessing antiretroviral treatment. Our review aims, firstly, to determine whether HIV self-testing is an effective method to increase the uptake of testing, the yield of new HIV-positive diagnoses, and the linkage to antiretroviral treatment. Secondly, we aim to review the factors that facilitate or impede the uptake of HIV self-testing. METHODS/DESIGN: Participants will be adults living in Africa. For the first aim, the intervention will be HIV self-testing either alone or in addition to HIV testing standard of care. The comparison will be HIV testing standard of care. The primary outcomes will be (i) uptake of HIV testing and (ii) yield of new HIV-positive diagnoses. The secondary outcomes will be (a) linkage to antiretroviral (ARV) treatment and (b) incidence of social harms. For the second aim, we will review barriers and facilitators to the uptake of self-testing. We will search PubMed, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Scopus, Web of Science, WHOLIS, Africa Wide, and CINAHL for eligible studies from 1998, with no language limits. We will check reference lists of included studies for other eligible reports. Eligible studies will include experimental and observational studies. Two authors will independently screen the search output, select studies, and extract data, resolving discrepancies by consensus and discussion. Two authors will use Cochrane risk of bias tools for experimental studies, the Newcastle-Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale for observational studies, and the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) quality assessment tool for qualitative studies. DISCUSSION: Innovative and cost-effective community-based HIV testing strategies, such as self-testing, will contribute to universal coverage of HIV testing in Africa. The findings from this systematic review will guide development of self-testing policy in African countries. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42015023935.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.060 | 0.072 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.019 | 0.015 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.052 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".