Objectives:
To assess paediatric antiretroviral treatment (ART) outcomes and their associations from a collaborative cohort representing 20% of the South African national treatment programme.
Design and setting:
Multi-cohort study of 7 public sector paediatric ART programmes in Gauteng, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces.
Subjects:
ART-naïve children (≤16 years) who commenced treatment with ≥3 antiretroviral drugs before March 2008.
Outcome measures:
Time to death or loss to follow-up were assessed using the Kaplan-Meier method. Associations between baseline characteristics and mortality were assessed with Cox-proportional hazards models stratified by site. Immune status, virologic suppression and growth were also described by duration on ART.
Results:
The median (IQR) age of 6078 children with 9368 child-years of follow-up was 43 (15 – 83) months, with 29% bein
