BACKGROUND Plasma HIV RNA levels reflect systemic viral replication but in CNS it may occur relatively independent of systemic infection, yet clinical application of CSF HIV-1 RNA levels is less clear. OBJECTIVE To compare CSF and plasma HIV-1 RNA levels of patients with different opportunistic neurological diseases to those without neurological disease, as well as to correlate these levels w...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Monitoring of HIV-infected individuals on antiretroviral treatment (ART) ideally requires periodic viral load measurements to ascertain adequate response to treatment. While plasma viral load monitoring is widely available in high-income settings, it is rarely used in resource-limited regions because of high cost and need for sophisticated sample transport. Dried blood s...

This paper provides an overview of HIV viral loads in blood and genital fluids and how these relate to HIV transmission during sexual activity. Current knowledge around HIV viral loads and transmission are then discussed in relation to HIV disclosure laws in Canada. HIV counsellors and health care workers should ensure that their clients/patients are aware that blood viral load is not necessari...

abstract background and aims: the burden of hiv infection and disease continues to be a major global public health concern all over the world. this study was conducted to measure igg antibody against ebv viral capsid antigen (ebv-vca igg), herpes simplex type1, and 2 to determine the seroprevalence of this infection in hiv-positive population. materials and methods: a cross-sectional study betw...

INTRODUCTION Malaria and HIV-1 infection cause significant morbidity and mortality in children in sub-Saharan Africa. Recurrent malaria infection increases HIV-1 viral load in adults and increases the rate of progression of HIV-1 infection to AIDS. The effect of malaria on viral loads in children living with AIDS (CLWA) is not clearly known. METHODS One hundred thirty five afebrile HIV-1 posi...

BACKGROUND Ensuring that people living with HIV are accessing and staying in care is vital to achieving optimal health outcomes including antiretroviral therapy (ART) success. We sought to characterize engagement in HIV care among participants of a large clinical cohort in Ontario, Canada, from 2001 to 2011. METHODS The Ontario HIV Treatment Network Cohort Study (OCS) is a multisite HIV clini...

Community viral load measurements have been postulated to be a population-based biomarker of HIV disease. We propose the use of the monitored community viral load (mCVL) as an aggregate measure of viral load among persons receiving HIV care with available HIV-1 plasma viral loads and applied it to our clinic population from 2003-2010. We demonstrated a reduction in mCVL from 16,589 copies/ml to...

HIV induces CD4 down-regulation from the surface of infected cells by several independent mechanisms, suggesting an important biological role for this phenomenon. In vitro CD4 down-regulation generates T cells with a double-negative (DN) CD4(-)CD8(-) T cell receptor-alphabeta(+) phenotype. However, evidence that this down-regulation occurs in vivo in HIV-infected subjects is lacking, and viral ...

Background Reduced thymic function causes poor immunological reconstitution in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive patients on combined antiretroviral therapy (cART). The association between immune activation and thymic function in asymptomatic HIV-positive treatment-naive individuals has thus far not been investigated. Aims and objectives To optimise a five-colour flow cytometric ass...

Some studies on untreated patients have shown a general correlation between plasma HIV copy number and plasma infectivity in in vitro models. Recent observations also indicate that HIV-RNA level is an important predictor of perinatal transmission and may also have a role in heterosexual transmission. To further analyse the correlation between HIV viral load and plasma infectivity, we studied th...