VOLUME

Health literacy is an important topic in people living with human immune deficiency virus (HIV). This review examined factors associated with health literacy among people living with HIV. We searched the literature available from PubMed and Scopus-Elsevier. Compound terms “health literacy” and “HIV health literacy” were employed to retrieve the relevant literature. The terms were typed in the following fields: article title, abstract and key words through the Boolean operator “AND”. We limited our searches to articles published in the period between 1993 and 2017 and in the English language. Factors associated with health literacy were critically reviewed and categorized. A total of 40 articles met inclusion criteria and were included in this literature review. They were clinical trials (n = 28), cross-sectional (n = 10) and pilot (n = 2) studies. The majority of the studies (68.42%) were conducted in the United States (US), while the rest were conducted in Africa. Whether gender plays a role in health literacy among people living with HIV was inconclusive. Factors associated with HIV health literacy among people living with HIV included education, age, and race. These factors could be used to predict the level of health literacy among people living with HIV. Further research conducted in other geographical regions is needed, given limited generalizability of these published articles’ results.