Menstrual health is essential for gender equity and the well-being of women and girls. Qualitative research has described the burden of poor menstrual health on health and education; however, these impacts have not been quantified, curtailing investment. The Adolescent Menstrual Experiences and Health Cohort (AMEHC) Study aims to describe menstrual health and its trajectories across adolescence, and quantify the relationships between menstrual health and girls’ health and education in Khulna, Bangladesh.

AMEHC is a prospective longitudinal cohort of 2016 adolescent girls recruited at the commencement of class 6 (secondary school, mean age=12) across 101 schools selected through a proportional random sampling approach. Each year, the cohort will be asked to complete a survey capturing (1) girls’ menstrual health and experiences, (2) support for menstrual health, and (3) health and education outcomes. Survey questions were refined through qualitative research, cognitive interviews and pilot survey in the year preceding the cohort. Girls’ guardians will be surveyed at baseline and wave 2 to capture their perspectives and household demographics. Annual assessments will capture schools’ water, sanitation and hygiene, and support for menstruation and collect data on participants’ education, including school attendance and performance (in maths, literacy). Cohort enrolment and baseline survey commenced in February 2023. Follow-up waves are scheduled for 2024, 2025 and 2026, with plans for extension. A nested subcohort will follow 406 post-menarche girls at 2-month intervals throughout 2023 (May, August, October) to describe changes across menstrual periods. This protocol outlines a priori hypotheses regarding the impacts of menstrual health to be tested through the cohort.

AMEHC has ethical approval from the Alfred Hospital Ethics Committee (369/22) and BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health Institutional Review Board (IRB-06 July 22-024). Study materials and outputs will be available open access through peer-reviewed publication and study web pages.

The measure of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) data in electronic health records (EHR) has been critical for addressing health disparities and inequalities, especially for HIV care. Given that gender and sexual minorities (eg, transgender, men who have sex with men and intersex) are key groups in people living with HIV (PLWH), SOGI data can facilitate a more accurate understanding about the HIV outcomes (eg, viral suppression) among this key group and then lead to tailored therapeutic services. The two-step SOGI collection method as an emerging gender measurement can be used to measure SOGI status in medical settings. Using the statewide cohort of PLWH in South Carolina (SC), this project aims to: (1) integrate statewide PLWH cohort data with their birth certificate data to evaluate SOGI measurements from multiple EHR sources; and (2) examine differences in viral suppression based on SOGI measurements.

Our EHR database includes several HIV data sources with patients’ gender information, such as SC Department of Health and Environmental Control Centre (DHEC), Health Sciences South Carolina (HSSC) and Prisma as well as birth certificate data to retrieve the sex at birth. The SC Enhanced HIV/AIDS Reporting System (e-HARS) from DHEC will provide longitudinal viral load information to define a variety of viral suppression status. Datasources like the SC office of Revenue and Fiscal Affairs (RFA) will extract longitudinal EHR clinical data of all PLWH in SC from multiple health systems; obtain data from other state agencies and link the patient-level data with county-level data from multiple publicly available data sources.

The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of South Carolina (Pro00129906) as a Non-Human Subject study. The study’s findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals and disseminated at national and international conferences and through social media.

To explore factors associated with early age at entry into sex work, among a cohort of female sex workers (FSWs) in Nairobi, Kenya.

Younger age at sex work initiation increases the risk of HIV acquisition, condom non-use, violence victimisation and alcohol and/or substance use problems. This study aimed to understand factors in childhood and adolescence that shape the vulnerability to underage sex work initiation.

Building on previous qualitative research with this cohort, analysis of behavioural–biological cross-sectional data using hierarchical logistic regression.

FSWs aged 18–45 years were randomly selected from seven Sex Workers Outreach Programme clinics in Nairobi, and between June and December 2019, completed a baseline behavioural–biological survey. Measurement tools included WHO Adverse Childhood Experiences, Alcohol, Smoking and Substance Involvement Screening Test and questionnaires on sociodemographic information, sexual risk behaviours and gender-based violence. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression were conducted using hierarchical modelling.

Of the 1003 FSWs who participated in the baseline survey (response rate 96%), 176 (17.5%) initiated sex work while underage (

Lower education level and childhood homelessness, combined with sexual violence and sexual risk behaviours in childhood, create pathways to underage initiation into sex work. Interventions designed for girls and young women at these pivotal points in their lives could help prevent underage sex work initiation and their associated health, social and economic consequences.

Health disparities exist at every step of the HIV care continuum (HCC) among racial/ethnic minority population. Such racial/ethnic disparities may have significantly delayed the progress in HCC in the Southern US states that are strongly represented among geographic focus areas in the 2019 federal initiative titled ‘Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America’. However, limited efforts have been made to quantify the long-term spatiotemporal variations of HCC disparities and their contributing factors over time, particularly in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. This project aims to identify the spatiotemporal patterns of racial disparities of each HCC outcome and then determine the contribution of contextual features for temporal change of disparities in HCC.

This cohort study will use statewide HIV cohort data in South Carolina, including all people living with HIV (PLWH) who were diagnosed with HIV in 2005–2020. The healthcare encounter data will be extracted from longitudinal EHR from six state agencies and then linked to aggregated county-level community and social structural-level data (eg, structural racism, COVID-19 pandemic) from multiple publicly available data sources. The South Carolina Revenue of Fiscal and Affairs will serve as the honest broker to link the patient-level and county-level information. We will first quantify the HCC-related disparities by creating a county-level racial/ethnic disparity index (RDI) for each key HCC outcomes (eg, HIV testing, timely diagnosis), examine the temporal patterns of each RDI over time and then using geographical weighted lasso model examine which contextual factors have significant impacts on the change of county-level RDI from 2005 to 2020.

The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of South Carolina (Pro00121718) as a Non-Human Subject study. The study’s findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals and disseminated at national and international conferences and through social media.

This scoping review aims to identify and synthesise existing statistical methods used to assess the progress of HIV treatment programmes in terms of the HIV cascade and continuum of care among people living with HIV (PLHIV).

Systematic scoping review.

Published articles were retrieved from PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) Complete and Excerpta Medica dataBASE (EMBASE) databases between April and July 2022. We also strategically search using the Google Scholar search engine and reference lists of published articles.

This scoping review included original English articles that estimated and described the HIV cascade and continuum of care progress in PLHIV. The review considered quantitative articles that evaluated either HIV care cascade progress in terms of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS targets or the dynamics of engagement in HIV care.

The first author and the librarian developed database search queries and screened the retrieved titles and abstracts. Two independent reviewers and the first author extracted data using a standardised data extraction tool. The data analysis was descriptive and the findings are presented in tables and visuals.

This review included 300 articles. Cross-sectional study design methods were the most commonly used to assess the HIV care cascade (n=279, 93%). In cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, the majority used proportions to describe individuals at each cascade stage (276/279 (99%) and 20/21 (95%), respectively). In longitudinal studies, the time spent in cascade stages, transition probabilities and cumulative incidence functions was estimated. The logistic regression model was common in both cross-sectional (101/279, 36%) and longitudinal studies (7/21, 33%). Of the 21 articles that used a longitudinal design, six articles used multistate models, which included non-parametric, parametric, continuous-time, time-homogeneous and discrete-time multistate Markov models.

Most literature on the HIV cascade and continuum of care arises from cross-sectional studies. The use of longitudinal study design methods in the HIV cascade is growing because such methods can provide additional information about transition dynamics along the cascade. Therefore, a methodological guide for applying different types of longitudinal design methods to the HIV continuum of care assessments is warranted.