Estimating Causal Effects of HIV Prevention Interventions with Interference in Network-based Studies among People Who Inject Drugs

TL;DR

This study develops and applies inverse probability weighted estimators to assess the causal impact of community alerts on HIV risk behaviors within social networks of people who inject drugs, accounting for interference effects.

Contribution

It introduces consistent, asymptotically normal IPW estimators that handle overlapping interference sets in network-based observational studies of HIV interventions.

Findings

Community alerts reduced HIV risk behaviors in the network

Estimators demonstrated good finite-sample performance in simulations

Analysis showed protective effects of alerts on HIV risk

Abstract

Evaluating causal effects in the presence of interference is challenging in network-based studies of hard-to-reach populations. Like many such populations, people who inject drugs (PWID) are embedded in social networks and often exert influence on others in their network. In our setting, the study design is observational with a non-randomized network-based HIV prevention intervention. Information is available on each participant and their connections that confer possible HIV risk through injection and sexual behaviors. We considered two inverse probability weighted (IPW) estimators to quantify the population-level effects of non-randomized interventions on subsequent health outcomes. We demonstrated that these two IPW estimators are consistent, asymptotically normal, and derived a closed-form estimator for the asymptotic variance, while allowing for overlapping interference sets (groups of individuals in which the interference is assumed possible). A simulation study was conducted to evaluate the finite-sample performance of the estimators. We analyzed data from the Transmission Reduction Intervention Project, which ascertained a network of PWID and their contacts in Athens, Greece, from 2013 to 2015. We evaluated the effects of community alerts on HIV risk behavior in this observed network, where the links between participants were defined by using substances or having unprotected sex together. In the study, community alerts were distributed to inform people of recent HIV infections among individuals in close proximity in the observed network. The estimates of the risk differences for spillover using either IPW estimator demonstrated a protective effect. The results suggest that HIV risk behavior can be mitigated by exposure to a community alert when an increased risk of HIV is detected in the network.