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Needle syringe programmes and opioid substitution therapy for preventing hepatitis C transmission in people who inject drugs

Overview of attention for article published in Cochrane database of systematic reviews, September 2017
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  • In the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (98th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (95th percentile)

Mentioned by

news
18 news outlets
blogs
4 blogs
policy
5 policy sources
twitter
23 X users
wikipedia
1 Wikipedia page

Citations

dimensions_citation
265 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
441 Mendeley
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Title
Needle syringe programmes and opioid substitution therapy for preventing hepatitis C transmission in people who inject drugs
Published in
Cochrane database of systematic reviews, September 2017
DOI 10.1002/14651858.cd012021.pub2
Pubmed ID
Authors

Lucy Platt, Silvia Minozzi, Jennifer Reed, Peter Vickerman, Holly Hagan, Clare French, Ashly Jordan, Louisa Degenhardt, Vivian Hope, Sharon Hutchinson, Lisa Maher, Norah Palmateer, Avril Taylor, Julie Bruneau, Matthew Hickman

Abstract

Needle syringe programmes and opioid substitution therapy for preventing hepatitis C transmission in people who inject drugsNeedle syringe programmes (NSP) and opioid substitution therapy (OST) are the primary interventions to reduce hepatitis C (HCV) transmission in people who inject drugs. There is good evidence for the effectiveness of NSP and OST in reducing injecting risk behaviour and increasing evidence for the effectiveness of OST and NSP in reducing HIV acquisition risk, but the evidence on the effectiveness of NSP and OST for preventing HCV acquisition is weak. To assess the effects of needle syringe programmes and opioid substitution therapy, alone or in combination, for preventing acquisition of HCV in people who inject drugs. We searched the Cochrane Drug and Alcohol Register, CENTRAL, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR), the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), the Health Technology Assessment Database (HTA), the NHS Economic Evaluation Database (NHSEED), MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, Global Health, CINAHL, and the Web of Science up to 16 November 2015. We updated this search in March 2017, but we have not incorporated these results into the review yet. Where observational studies did not report any outcome measure, we asked authors to provide unpublished data. We searched publications of key international agencies and conference abstracts. We reviewed reference lists of all included articles and topic-related systematic reviews for eligible papers. We included prospective and retrospective cohort studies, cross-sectional surveys, case-control studies and randomised controlled trials that measured exposure to NSP and/or OST against no intervention or a reduced exposure and reported HCV incidence as an outcome in people who inject drugs. We defined interventions as current OST (within previous 6 months), lifetime use of OST and high NSP coverage (regular attendance at an NSP or all injections covered by a new needle/syringe) or low NSP coverage (irregular attendance at an NSP or less than 100% of injections covered by a new needle/syringe) compared with no intervention or reduced exposure. We followed the standard Cochrane methodological procedures incorporating new methods for classifying risk of bias for observational studies. We described study methods against the following 'Risk of bias' domains: confounding, selection bias, measurement of interventions, departures from intervention, missing data, measurement of outcomes, selection of reported results; and we assigned a judgment (low, moderate, serious, critical, unclear) for each criterion. We identified 28 studies (21 published, 7 unpublished): 13 from North America, 5 from the UK, 4 from continental Europe, 5 from Australia and 1 from China, comprising 1817 incident HCV infections and 8806.95 person-years of follow-up. HCV incidence ranged from 0.09 cases to 42 cases per 100 person-years across the studies. We judged only two studies to be at moderate overall risk of bias, while 17 were at serious risk and 7 were at critical risk; for two unpublished datasets there was insufficient information to assess bias. As none of the intervention effects were generated from RCT evidence, we typically categorised quality as low. We found evidence that current OST reduces the risk of HCV acquisition by 50% (risk ratio (RR) 0.50, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.40 to 0.63, I(2) = 0%, 12 studies across all regions, N = 6361), but the quality of the evidence was low. The intervention effect remained significant in sensitivity analyses that excluded unpublished datasets and papers judged to be at critical risk of bias. We found evidence of differential impact by proportion of female participants in the sample, but not geographical region of study, the main drug used, or history of homelessness or imprisonment among study samples.Overall, we found very low-quality evidence that high NSP coverage did not reduce risk of HCV acquisition (RR 0.79, 95% CI 0.39 to 1.61) with high heterogeneity (I(2) = 77%) based on five studies from North America and Europe involving 3530 participants. After stratification by region, high NSP coverage in Europe was associated with a 76% reduction in HCV acquisition risk (RR 0.24, 95% CI 0.09 to 0.62) with less heterogeneity (I(2) =0%). We found low-quality evidence of the impact of combined high coverage of NSP and OST, from three studies involving 3241 participants, resulting in a 74% reduction in the risk of HCV acquisition (RR 0.26 95% CI 0.07 to 0.89). OST is associated with a reduction in the risk of HCV acquisition, which is strengthened in studies that assess the combination of OST and NSP. There was greater heterogeneity between studies and weaker evidence for the impact of NSP on HCV acquisition. High NSP coverage was associated with a reduction in the risk of HCV acquisition in studies in Europe.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 23 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 441 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 441 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 62 14%
Researcher 59 13%
Student > Bachelor 40 9%
Other 30 7%
Student > Ph. D. Student 29 7%
Other 63 14%
Unknown 158 36%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 104 24%
Nursing and Health Professions 47 11%
Social Sciences 27 6%
Psychology 19 4%
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology 9 2%
Other 54 12%
Unknown 181 41%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 180. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 05 October 2023.
All research outputs
#223,805
of 25,461,852 outputs
Outputs from Cochrane database of systematic reviews
#377
of 12,090 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#4,670
of 325,697 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Cochrane database of systematic reviews
#8
of 191 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,461,852 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 12,090 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 38.2. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 97% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 325,697 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 191 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 95% of its contemporaries.