Do Sex and Race/Ethnicity Influence CD4 Cell Response in Patients who Achieve Virologic Suppression during Antiretroviral Therapy? Clinical Infectious Diseases

To determine whether CD4 cell count response to virus suppression during highly active antiretroviral therapy differs according to sex or race/ethnicity, we analyzed data in our observational cohort study for patients receiving their first antiretroviral regimen who experienced virus suppression by 6 months of therapy. In both univariate and multivariate analyses, women had greater CD4 cell count increases, compared with men, as did patients receiving a regimen that did not include a protease inhibitor. Race/ethnicity was not a factor. In the United States, the population-based crude mor-tality rate for women with AIDS is ∼20 % higher than that for men with AIDS. Similarly, the mortality rate for Hispanic patients with AIDS is ∼20 % higher and that for African American patients with AIDS is ∼50% higher than that for white patients with AIDS [1]. Ad-justed population-based data from the United States currently are not available. In both the HIV-uninfected and-infected populations, women have higher CD4 cell counts than men do [2, 3], whereas African American