Citation Information

Herbeck JT, Gottlieb GS, Li X, Hu Z, Detels R, Phair J, Rinaldo C, Jacobson LP, Margolick JB, Mullins JI (2008). Lack of evidence for changing virulence of HIV-1 in North America. PloS one, 3(2), e1525. (pubmed) (doi)

Abstract

Several long-term cohort studies and in-vitro fitness assays have resulted in inconsistent reports on changes in HIV-1 virulence, including reports of decreasing, stable, and increasing virulence over the course of the AIDS pandemic. We tested the hypothesis of changing HIV-1 virulence by examining trends in prognostic clinical markers of disease progression from 1984 to 2005 among nearly 400 antiretroviral-naïve participants in the United States Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS), a longitudinal study of HIV infection in men who have sex with men (MSM).