Predicting the duration of antiviral treatment needed to suppress plasma HIV-1 RNA

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Abstract

Effective therapeutic interventions and clinical care of adults infected with HIV-1 require an understanding of factors that influence time of response to antiretroviral therapy. We have studied a cohort of 118 HIV-1–infected subjects naive to antiretroviral therapy and have correlated the time of response to treatment with a series of virological and immunological measures, including levels of viral load in blood and lymph node, percent of CD4 T cells in lymph nodes, and CD4 T-cell count in blood at study entry. Suppression of viremia below the limit of detection, 50 HIV-1 RNA copies/mL of plasma, served as a benchmark for a successful virological response. We employed these correlations to predict the length of treatment required to attain a virological response in each patient. Baseline plasma viremia emerged as the factor most tightly correlated with the duration of treatment required, allowing us to estimate the required time as a function of this one measure.

Authors

G. Paolo Rizzardi, Rob J. De Boer, Shelley Hoover, Giuseppe Tambussi, Aude Chapuis, Nermin Halkic, Pierre-Alexandre Bart, Veronica Miller, Schlomo Staszewski, Daan W. Notermans, Luc Perrin, Cecil H. Fox, Joep M.A. Lange, Adriano Lazzarin, Giuseppe Pantaleo