HIV and malaria prevalence among pregnant women with and without pre-eclampsia at the Atua Government Hospital in Ghana’s eastern region

Objective: To evaluate the association of malaria and HIV with pre-eclampsia by evaluating their prevalence among pregnant women. Methods: Using a case–control study design, we randomly sampled the antenatal records of 125 pregnant women with clinician-diagnosed pre-eclampsia (cases) and 125 others without pre-eclampsia (controls) who visited Atua Government Hospital in the eastern region of Ghana between June 2014 and January 2017. All selected records had available routine HIV and malaria test results and were analyzed statistically. Results: In all 250 records, 122 (48.8%) were HIV positive and 35 (14.0%) had malaria. Of the 122 HIV-positive pregnant women, 29 (23.8%) were cases and 93 (76.2%) were controls; of the 35 women with malaria, one was in the case group (1/35, 2.9%) and the other 34 (97.1%) were in the control. Group. Pregnant women with pre-eclampsia had lower odds of HIV infection (odds ratio [OR] 0.10, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.06–0.19: adjusted AOR 0.07, 95% CI 0.04–0.13, P < 0.001). Similarly, pregnant women with pre-eclampsia had lower odds of having malaria infection (OR 0.02, 95% CI 0.00–0.17, P = 0.025; adjusted OR 0.00, 95% CI 0.00–0.01, P < 0.001). Conclusions: Women with pre-eclampsia had lower odds of HIV and malaria infection in pregnancy.