Women and TB/HIV coinfection in Brazil: regional inequalities and trends in a scenario of vulnerability.
Emillyn Vitoria de Oliveira, Jarbas da Silva Ziani, Laís Mara Caetano da Silva Corcini and 5 others
PMID 41739680WHAT IT FOUND
TB/HIV coinfection in Brazilian women did not rise or fall in any region from 2012 to 2023.
Cases concentrated in younger, less-educated women; Black women were most often reported in four regions, and the South had the highest treatment abandonment and drug resistance.
Key findings
01Between 2012 and 2023, 31,171 TB/HIV coinfection cases were reported in women in Brazil, concentrated in the Southeast with 11,791 cases (37.8%) and the South with 7,958 cases (25.5%).
02The annual trend in reported TB/HIV coinfection cases in women was classified as stationary in all five regions, with the highest rate value in the South (51.45) and the next highest in the North (37.92).
03Cure was reported in a higher proportion in all five regions, but treatment abandonment was 27.9% and drug-resistant TB was 2.0% in the South.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study used retrospective secondary data from a national reporting system, so the results depend on how cases were recorded. The database may contain incomplete or missing variables, and underreporting may have underestimated the true number of cases. It is an ecological study of regional counts, so the findings cannot be applied directly to individual patients or used to infer individual-level causes. The study did not test any nursing or health service intervention, so it cannot show whether monitoring, education, or treatment support changed outcomes. Delays in making recent data available may have affected the timeliness of the information analyzed.
Declared interests
No funding or conflict-of-interest statement appears in the supplied text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the stable trend as proof that TB/HIV coinfection in women is under control, or the South's higher abandonment and drug resistance as proof of poor care. The study used aggregate registry data with possible underreporting and missing entries, so it cannot show what happened to individual patients or whether any intervention caused these patterns.