[Meta analysis on the co-infection between Mycobacterium tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in China]

To understand and estimate the rate of co-infection between Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Based on the related literature regarding Chinese M. tuberculosis and HIV co-infection being published between 2000 and 2012 in PubMed, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wan Fang Databases and the Chinese Science & Technology Journal Database (VIP), we extracted related information and applied the generic inverse variance model to estimate the following parameters as: co-infection rate, differences on gender, region and subgroups. We also used the STROBE Statement and observational quality evaluation standard to evaluate the quality of literature, and employed sensitivity analyses to evaluate the impact of research quality.

39 papers were included in this Meta-analysis, which contained a total sample size of 168 286. The co-infection rate of HIV in TB patients was 0.86% (95%CI: 0.80% - 0.93%), when using the generic inverse variance model. According to subgroups analyses, at α = 0.05 level, men had a higher co-infection rate (1.53%) than women (0.54%) and areas with high infection rate of HIV/AIDS (0.91%) were more commonly seen than low infection rate areas of HIV/AIDS (0.71%) and with significant differences. The co-infection rate of M. tuberculosis in patients infected with HIV was 14.44% (95%CI: 13.62% - 15.30%). Data from subgroup analyses also showed that at the α = 0.05 level, the co-infection rates from hospital samples (28.64%) were higher than those from the population samples' (4.74%). The co-infection rate (15.79%) from the western region was higher than that in the Central and Eastern regions (13.88% and 6.47% respectively), with significant differences. After excluding the papers that only met a few items of the STRODE Statement, results of the Meta-analysis were very close to the original results.

The co-infection rate of both M. tuberculosis and HIV was high in China. Therefore, it was crucial for people and related organizations to pay more attention to this problem of co-infection.