The International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) is an international research consortium established in 2006 by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to identify and address high-priority HIV/AIDS research questions.
The Central Africa IeDEA (CA-IeDEA) cohort involves HIV researchers and care and treatment partners in five countries—Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, and Rwanda. The CA-IeDEA cohort includes more than 86,000 patients who ever enrolled into HIV care at participating sites, with close to 40,000 active patients—patients who are currently receiving HIV care—at 21 CA-IeDEA sites. Utilizing longitudinal data from participating sites and implementation science approaches, CA-IeDEA partners are examining HIV care and treatment outcomes among an observational cohort of adult and pediatric HIV patients in order to:
- Identify effective strategies for optimizing HIV care outcomes, including timely diagnosis and care enrollment, care retention, ART initiation and viral suppression.
- Conduct clinical epidemiologic investigations of co-morbidities of aging among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA).
IeDEA-CA also leads and contributes to multi-regional IeDEA projects, and it maintains updated population-based data from various sources for use in examining contextual determinants of HIV outcomes.
CA-IeDEA research is jointly led by Dr. Kathryn Anastos (Montefiore Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine), Dr. Denis Nash (CUNY Institute of Implementation Science in Population Health), and Dr. Marcel Yotebieng (Albert Einstein College of Medicine), in partnership with investigators from the Centre National de Reference en Matière de VIH/SIDA (Burundi); the Kinshasa School of Public Health and Kalembelembe Pediatric Hospital (DRC); the Centre de Traitement Ambulatoire de Pointe Noire and Centre de Traitement Ambulatoire de Brazzaville (Republic of Congo); the Clinical Research Education and Consultancy (CRENC) Foundation (Cameroon), Rwanda Military Hospital, Data Solutions LLC, Vanderbilt University, Columbia University, the Ohio State University, and Virginia Commonwealth University.