Publications by authors named "G Rota"

Background: Despite their ubiquity across sub-Saharan Africa, private pharmacies are underutilized for HIV service delivery beyond the sale of HIV self-test kits. To understand what uptake of HIV prevention and treatment services might look like if private pharmacies offered clients free HIV self-testing and referral to clinic-based HIV services, we conducted a pilot study in Kenya.

Methods: At 20 private pharmacies in Kisumu County, Kenya, pharmacy clients (≥ 18 years) purchasing sexual health-related products (e.

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Objective: To determine the safety, tolerance, and adherence to self-administered intravaginal 5% fluorouracil (5FU) cream as adjuvant therapy following cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 2 or 3 (CIN2/3) treatment among women living with HIV (WLWH) in Kenya.

Methods: A phase I pilot trial was performed among 12 WLWH in Kenya, aged 18-49 years between March 2023 and February 2024 (ClinicalTrial.gov NCT05362955).

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Article Synopsis
  • A mental health study in western Kenya tested the feasibility of delivering treatments for major depression and PTSD through non-specialist staff in primary care settings, incorporating both in-person and mobile health (mHealth) options due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • The chosen intervention involved either psychotherapy (Interpersonal Psychotherapy) or medication (fluoxetine), with 2,162 public sector primary care patients participating.
  • A secondary analysis assessed participants' preferences for mHealth or in-person treatment, exploring their reasons for choosing one method over the other and comparing demographic and clinical characteristics between the two groups.
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SMART DAPPER is an implementation science study responding to mental health treatment gaps for depression and trauma-related disorders in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We report on patient experiences in a study using a Sequential, Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) design to test first and second line non-specialist treatment using psychotherapy (Interpersonal Psychotherapy [IPT] or medication (fluoxetine [FLX]), integrated within public sector primary care in western Kenya. An embedded qualitative study conducted in-depth interviews (n = 17) and three (n = 3) focus group discussions with participants (May to October 2021).

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Background: Scalable PTSD screening strategies must be brief, accurate and capable of administration by a non-specialized workforce.

Methods: We used PTSD as determined by the structured clinical interview as our gold standard and considered predictors sets of (a) Posttraumatic Stress Checklist-5 (PCL-5), (b) Primary Care PTSD Screen for the DSM-5 (PC-PTSD) and, (c) PCL-5 and PC-PTSD questions to identify the optimal items for PTSD screening for public sector settings in Kenya. A logistic regression model using LASSO was fit by minimizing the average squared error in the validation data.

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