Search

The aim of this study is to examine how physicians use clinical practice guidelines that call for routine HIV screening in a general adolescent medicine clinic and to determine how adolescent patients respond to routine screening. Physicians offered screening to 116 of 217 patients (53%) aged 13-21 who completed a survey. Physicians' offers conformed to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines with 73% of patients because some patients not offered a test had been screened within the last year. Physicians were three times more likely (OR = 3.0; 95% CI = 1.3-6.8) to offer HIV screening to sexually active adolescents than to adolescents who reported no sexual history. Adolescent medicine physicians and their patients endorse the idea of routine screening as embodied in the latest CDC recommendations, but adolescents with no sexual history are less likely than other adolescents to accept screening when it is offered and to support a clinic policy of routine screening. Both physicians and their adolescent patients continue to test based on risk assessments.

The authors report that individuals who are at highest risk of contracting HIV indicated the greatest concern about confidentiality and the greatest knowledge of local reporting laws. Although concern about confidentiality may not be cited as the most common reason to delay or defer testing, it is an important consideration for a minority of individuals--the very segment who are at highest risk of contracting HIV and are the most important targets of campaigns to encourage HIV testing. The particular concerns of this critical segment of the population at risk must be directly and carefully addressed and not lost in a general assessment of population-wide attitudes/concerns about HIV testing. Studies that examine individuals' concerns about HIV testing and privacy and do not stratify by level of HIV risk may obscure the important and heightened concerns of this most important subpopulation.

Unlabelled: OBJECTIVE--To describe the identification of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected infants born to women who were seronegative or indeterminate during pregnancy. RESEARCH DESIGN--Longitudinal cohort study. SETTING--Inner-city medical center., Participants: A series of children born to women with histories of risk factors for HIV infection were followed up for studies of the natural history of HIV-infected infants. These children were identified through risk factor assessment of pregnant women presenting for obstetric care. INTERVENTIONS--Counseling and testing to detect HIV. RESULTS--Three women were retrospectively identified who were infected with HIV during pregnancy but whose test results showed them to be either seronegative or indeterminate. Two of these women transmitted HIV infection to their children. Subsequently, all three women were confirmed to be infected. CONCLUSIONS--Standard serologic testing to detect HIV infection will not identify all infected pregnant women. Perinatal transmission of HIV can occur in women with negative results of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay or indeterminate results of Western blot analysis during pregnancy.