Mortality among pediatric patients on HIV treatment in sub-Saharan African countries: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Despite substantial improvements in accessibility of Anti-Retroviral Treatment (ART), death of children on ART remains a prevailing challenge in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. However, the pooled magnitude of mortality at different ART follow-up periods remains unknown for the region. We estimated the pooled proportion of all-cause mortality for pediatric patients receiving first-line ART at 3, 6, 12, and 24 months follow-up period in SSA.

Methods: We searched for relevant articles published between January 2014 and June 2018 on PubMed, Hinari and Google scholar databases. We searched for additional articles from reference lists and 2014-2018 abstracts archived by the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) and the International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science (IAS).

Results: We reviewed 29 articles reporting mortality among pediatric ART patients at different follow-up periods in countries from 2001 to 2016. Among the 51,619 pediatric ART patients in these cohorts, studies reported 4061 (7.9%) all-cause cumulative death. The cumulative pooled proportion of mortality at 3, 6, 12 and 24 months of ART were 3% (95% CI: 3.0-4.0), 5% (95% CI: 4.0-6.0), 6% (95% CI: 5.0-7.0) and 7% (95% CI: 6.0-8.0), respectively.

Conclusions: In SSA, significant proportion of mortality among children occurs in the first 3-6 months of ART initiation. Western Africa has a little higher estimate of mortality among pediatric ART patients at 6 and 12 months of follow-up. Strategies to prevent early mortality including thorough screening and management of opportunistic infections before ART initiation are needed.