Brief Report Hepatitis B in Patients with HIV Infection: Relationship to AIDS and Patient Survival

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is common among persons with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in-fection (1-4). Hepatitis B virus DNA is found in lym-phoid cells of patients co-infected with HBV and HIV (5), and studies in cultured cells co-infected or trans-fected with HIV and HBV DNA indicate that the HBV X gene product enhances HIV gene expression (6, 7). These findings suggest that infection with HBV may accelerate progression of HIV-related disease, but lim-ited clinical information is available. Therefore, we ret-rospectively analyzed sera from 511 HIV-infected pa-tients for evidence of hepatitis B, in order to examine the relationship between serologic evidence of HBV infection and the presence of AIDS as well as the in-fluence of chronic HBV infection on survival