Food insecurity is increasingly reported as an important barrier of patient adherence to antiretroviral therapy ART in both resource-poor and rich settings. However, unlike in resource rich-settings, very few quantitative studies to date have investigated the association of food insecurity with patient adherence to ART in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This is a cross-sectional quantitative study of patients receiving ART at three private and one public health facilities in Kinshasa, DRC.
Participants were consecutively recruited into the study between April and November Adherence was measured using a combined method coupling pharmacy refill and self-reported adherence. We also found that perceived harmfulness of ART and psychological distress were associated respectively with increased AOR, 1. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Prior studies have shown that, without high and sustained adherence levels, both therapeutic and public health benefits of ART cannot be secured, and that individuals with sub-optimal levels of adherence have higher risk of incomplete viral suppression, disease progression, and development of drug resistance [7] β [9].
