HIV

Individuals with serious mental illness have greater risk for contracting HIV, multiple morbidities, and die 25 years younger than the general population. This high need and high cost subgroup face unique barriers to accessing required health care in the current health care system. The effectiveness of an advanced practice nurse model of care management was assessed in a four-year random controlled trial. Results are reported in this paper.

  As part of a larger randomized controlled trial examining the efficacy of an HIV/AIDS symptom management manual (n = 775), this study examined the prevalence of peripheral neuropathy in HIV-infected individuals at 12 sites in the USA, Puerto Rico, and Africa. Neuropathy was reported by 44% of the sample; however, only 29.4% reported initiating self-care behaviors to address the neuropathy symptoms. Antiretroviral therapy was found to increase the frequency of neuropathy symptoms, with an increased mean intensity of 28%.

PURPOSE: We examined the prevalence of recent HIV testing among sexually active adult Black women in the United States and the social, behavioral, and health care factors associated with their receipt of these services.
METHODS: Data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth were obtained. Our analyses focused on 1,122 sexually active non-Hispanic Black women aged 18-44 years. Descriptive and multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted on the total sample of women and on 3 subsamples of women, stratified by age group.

This secondary analysis used E. Goffman's (1963) model of stigma to examine how social support and health status are related to HIV stigma, after controlling for specific sociodemographic factors, and how these relationships differed between men and women living with HIV. Baseline data from 183 subjects in a behavioral randomized clinical trial were analyzed using multigroup structural equation modeling. Women reported significantly higher levels of stigma than men after controlling for race, history of injection drug use, and exposure category.

This study was a secondary analysis of the relationships among lifetime experiences of violence, depressive symptoms, substance use, safer sex behaviors use, and past-year sexually transmitted infection (STI) treatment among a sample of 445 low income, primarily African American women (257 HIV-, 188 HIV+) reporting a male intimate partner within the past year. Twenty-one percent of HIV and 33% of HIV+ women reported past-year STI treatment. Violence victimization increased women's odds of past-year STI treatment, controlling for HIV status and age.

Fifteen African American women with a history of intimate partner violence (IPV) were interviewed to examine (a) the ways in which poor, urban African American women stay healthy, and particularly how they protected themselves from sexually transmitted diseases and HIV while in abusive relationships; and (b) the roles of intersecting contextual factors such as lifetime experiences of violence, mental health symptoms, and substance use in women's processes of maintaining their health. Data were analyzed using a qualitative descriptive approach.

Throughout the history of the HIV epidemic, HIV-positive patients with relatively high CD4 counts and no clinical features of opportunistic infections have been classified as "asymptomatic" by definition and treatment guidelines. This classification, however, does not take into consideration the array of symptoms that an HIV-positive person can experience long before progressing to AIDS. This short report describes two international multi-site studies conducted in 2003-2005 and 2005-2007.

A number of theoretical fatigue frameworks have been developed by nurse scientists with the intention of guiding research, practice, and education in fatigue. However, there is a significant gap between theory development and research utilization of fatigue frameworks in clinical and intervention trials.