Identifying Syndemic Factors and Their Effect on HIV Sexual Risk Behavior Among Gay, Bisexual and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We set out to identify syndemic factors associated with HIV sexual risk behavior among HIV-negative gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBM), and examine associations between syndemic factors and HIV sexual risk behaviors using models of co-occurring epidemics. We used baseline data from 1571 sexually active GBM from the Engage Cohort study, recruited using respondent-driven sampling in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. We explored associations between potential syndemic factors and HIV sexual risk behavior, and used oblique component analysis to reduce the number of variables. Path analysis and logistic regression with interaction terms were used to evaluate the association of syndemic factors with HIV sexual risk behavior. In the mediation model, childhood sexual abuse (CSA) was associated with HIV sexual risk behavior (total effect: c = 0.14, 95% CI 0.06-0.21). This effect was mediated by any intimate partner violence (IPV), transactional sex, polysubstance use, and sexual compulsivity. We observed a multiplicative interaction between CSA and transactional sex: GBM with a history of both had 14 times the odds of HIV sexual risk behavior (aOR of 14.0 95% CI 5.6-35.2) compared to those with neither. The appropriate application of a syndemic approach allowed a nuanced assessment of syndemic factor associations with HIV sexual risk behavior. IPV, transactional sex, sexual compulsivity, and polysubstance use mediated the effect of CSA on HIV sexual risk behavior. Additionally, we found a significant multiplicative interaction between CSA and transactional sex.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".