PLoS medicine
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Crowdsourcing to expand HIV testing among men who have sex with men in China: A closed cohort stepped wedge cluster randomized controlled trial.
HIV testing rates are suboptimal among at-risk men. Crowdsourcing may be a useful tool for designing innovative, community-based HIV testing strategies to increase HIV testing. The purpose of this study was to use a stepped wedge cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effect of a crowdsourced HIV intervention on HIV testing uptake among men who have sex with men (MSM) in eight Chinese cities. ⋯ In this setting, crowdsourcing was effective for developing and strengthening community-based HIV testing services for MSM. Crowdsourced interventions may be an important tool for the scale-up of HIV testing services among MSM in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC).
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In a Policy Forum, Marc Lipsitch and colleagues discuss trial design issues in infectious disease outbreaks.
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Earlier puberty is widely linked with future obesity and cardiometabolic disease. We examined whether age at puberty onset likely influences adiposity and cardiometabolic traits independent of childhood adiposity. ⋯ Our results suggest that puberty timing has a small influence on adiposity and cardiometabolic traits and that preventive interventions should instead focus on reducing childhood adiposity.
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South Africa has the highest tuberculosis incidence globally (781/100,000), with an estimated 4.3% of cases being rifampicin resistant (RR). Control and elimination strategies will require detailed spatial information to understand where drug-resistant tuberculosis exists and why it persists in those communities. We demonstrate a method to enable drug-resistant tuberculosis monitoring by identifying high-burden communities in the Western Cape Province using routinely collected laboratory data. ⋯ Our maps reveal striking spatial and temporal heterogeneity in RR-tuberculosis percentages across this province. We demonstrate the potential to monitor RR-tuberculosis spatially and temporally with routinely collected laboratory data, enabling improved resource targeting and more rapid locally appropriate interventions.
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The association of metabolic syndrome (MetS) with the development of Parkinson disease (PD) is currently unclear. We sought to determine whether MetS and its components are associated with the risk of incident PD using large-scale cohort data for the whole South Korean population. ⋯ Our population-based large-scale cohort study suggests that MetS and its components may be risk factors of PD development.