Contact Admin. Thirty-seven studies were found eligible for inclusion in this research, encompassing a total of 46, subjects. The number of individuals infected with human immunodeficiency virus HIV-1 continues to increase worldwide. Many studies suggested that the most common mode of HIV transmission is associated with sexual affairs and relationships in the US; while, in Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine and Central Asia, intravenous drug use has been reported as the main mode of transmission.
Intravenous illegal drug use and unprotected sex contribute as the main risk factors for HIV transmission among this group. Over the past two decades remarkable successes have been achieved in reducing the risk of contamination with HIV, as well as the associated morbidity, mortality, and stigma, and indisputable improvements have been made in the quality-of-life of people living with HIV.
Since the treatment course of the disease and providing supportive care are difficult, highly costed, and complicated, the most important and feasible strategy could be the implementation of preventative measures such as education, counseling, and changing behavioral patterns. Moreover, additional manual searches were performed using reference lists of relevant articles to find further papers which may be missed in the electronic searching process. We examined the selected articles for relevance in three phases of title, abstract, and full text review.
Also, the studies with inadequate information, investigations other than descriptive research, review studies, abstracts published in congresses, non-English language published articles, systematic studies, meta-analyzes, and repeated investigations duplications were excluded from data analysis Table 2. Two of the authors searched for all the relevant articles and then provided a list of abstracts upon completion of the search.
Afterwards, all the research articles were individually reviewed; and 76 of them were excluded because of being duplicates. Another 90 papers were also excluded because they were published before Moreover, 14 articles were omitted due to the inaccessibility of their full text, and 17 studies were excluded because they were found to be meta-analyses and review articles rather than original publications.
