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Researchers have concluded that children born with HIV lived
longer and richer lives if their caregivers were trained to enhance their
development. Formerly, African children with HIV infection died in a few years.
Advances with antiretroviral therapy allow them to live longer, but with a poor
quality of life. Michael Boivin, professor in the departments of Psychiatry and
of Neurology and Ophthalmology at Michigan State University, and colleagues
conducted a one-year study with 120 preschool-aged HIV-infected children living
in rural Uganda and their caregivers.
Primary caregivers, many of whom were HIV-infected mothers,
were exposed randomly either to a childcare training program called Mediational
Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers (MISC) or an education program for
improving children’s health and nutrition. MISC used daily interactions at home
to improve children’s social skills, language, and cognitive ability. After the
year, children of MISC-trained caregivers exhibited significantly greater
developmental progress than the other children, including better memory and
learning skills.
Fewer children of MISC-trained caregivers died of the
opportunistic diseases that normally infect persons with a compromised immune
system, compared to children in the other group. Boivin suggested that
MISC-trained caregivers might have become more aware of the children’s health
needs and sought medical help in time to fight off illness. As a side effect,
MISC-trained caregivers were significantly less depressed than the other group,
after six months of the study. This might have been a result of the social
support they received during MISC training.
The National Institutes of Health funded the study.
The full report, “A Year-Long Caregiver Training Program
Improves Cognition in Preschool Ugandan Children with Human Immunodeficiency
Virus,” was published online in the Journal of Pediatrics (2013;
doi:10.1016/j.jpeds.2013.06.055).
