Table 2.

Risk behaviours associated with HIV/HCV Co-infection among PWID

Author/Year	Geographical location	No. of participants/Age	Study Design	Sampling strategy	Population Characteristics	HIV /HCV Coinfection	Sociodemographic factors	Injecting risk factors	Sexual risk factors	Study Strengths	Study Limitations	Quality Assessment Score
Ray Saraswati et al. (2015) [30]	Delhi	n = 3792 Aged 18 years and above	Longitudinal cohort study	Mapping exercise of hot spot area was done and participants were recruited through peer-referral and targeted outreach by outreach workers	Injecting in the past 3 months of data collection	Male- 449	Older age, illiterate, never married, Hindu religion, living at home with family or either living on the street, geographical location	Longer duration of injection (2-5yrs), a greater number of days injected in the past month (21–30 days), sharing needles/syringe, sharing of injecting equipment, using syringe filled by someone else	Not sexually active in the last 3 months	Large sample size which allowed for examining sociodemographic, injecting and sexual characteristics associated with strong statistical power and analysis and minimal recall bias	-Just two-thirds of participants returned for follow up -Low female participants hence they were removed from statistical analysis	8
Kermode et al. (2014)	Manipur	n = 821 Aged 18 years and above	Cross-sectional study	Respondent driven sampling	Injecting at least once in the past 6 months of data collection	Male- 241	Older age ≥ 30 yrs, illiterate, widowed, divorced or separated, being employed	Earlier age of first injection, longer duration of injecting, injecting at least once daily, sharing of injecting equipment, sharing of needle/syringe	-	RDS was used to recruit study participants	-Not possible to infer causation for outcome variables due to the nature of the study design - Social acceptability bias may have contributed to an under-estimate in the prevalence of unsafe injecting behaviour	10
Mahanta et al. (2008) [9]	Nagaland and Mizoram	n = 398 Aged 15 years and over	Cross-sectional study	PWID who attended drop-in centers within a given time period were randomly recruited for the study	Injecting within past 6 months of data collection	Male- 34	Older age ≥ 25 yrs, male gender, married	Use of heroin, longer duration of injecting, sharing injection containers	-	Pre-tested, pre-validated structured questionnaire was used	-Due to the random recruitment strategy the study findings are not representative of the PWID population of Nagaland and Mizoram -Temporality could not be established due to the cross-sectional nature of the study