Research Unit of Primary Care and Health, General Practice Department, University of Liège, Quartier Hôpital B23, Avenue Hippocrate 13, 4000, Liège, Belgium.
Soc Sci Med. 2022 Aug;306:115162. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115162. Epub 2022 Jun 26.
Men who have sex with Men (MSM) represent a population affected by numerous health conditions. Syndemic theory has been used as a framework to study the health of MSM for nearly 20 years. However, the literature is plagued by a lack of consensus regarding what constitutes a synergy in a syndemic and recent reviews have shown that most of the papers published thus far have failed to demonstrate a synergy nor describe the bio-social interaction needed to account for a true syndemic. Moreover, to our knowledge, none of the existing reviews have focused specifically on MSM. This scoping review aims to fill this gap by mapping in detail how syndemic research on MSM has been conducted. A systematic database search was conducted between 2020 and 2021 and 115 studies were included. Our findings showed a lack of diversity regarding the location, design, subpopulation, and outcomes studied. In addition, the syndemic conditions, as well as their measurement, were not focused enough to ensure the robustness and reproducibility of the findings. Furthermore, our results support previous reviews showing a lack of empirical data to support disease interaction in syndemic research applied to MSM. Our review offers some important recommendations to help move the field forward in future work and describes some promising methodological advances.
男男性行为者（MSM）是受多种健康状况影响的人群。近 20 年来，综合征理论一直被用作研究 MSM 健康状况的框架。然而，文献中对于什么构成综合征中的协同作用缺乏共识，最近的综述表明，迄今为止发表的大多数论文都未能证明协同作用，也没有描述为了真正的综合征而需要的生物社会相互作用。此外，据我们所知，现有的综述中没有专门针对 MSM 的。这项范围综述旨在通过详细描述 MSM 的综合征研究是如何进行的来填补这一空白。在 2020 年至 2021 年期间进行了系统的数据库搜索，共纳入了 115 项研究。我们的研究结果表明，在研究地点、设计、亚人群和结果方面缺乏多样性。此外，综合征状况及其测量不够集中，无法确保研究结果的稳健性和可重复性。此外，我们的研究结果支持之前的综述，表明缺乏支持 MSM 应用的综合征研究中疾病相互作用的经验数据。我们的综述提供了一些重要的建议，以帮助该领域在未来的工作中取得进展，并描述了一些有前途的方法学进展。
