Correspondence Uncertainty as to Whether the Use of Antiretroviral Therapy for Persons Recently Infected with HIV Has a Favorable Risk-to- Benefit Ratio

To the Editor—The invited article by Wilkin and Gulick [1] excellently sum-marizes the existing data and recommen-dations that may be used to decide on when to initiate antiretroviral therapy (ART), except for one area. In their ab-stract, Wilkin and Gulick [1] state that “large clinical cohorts clearly have dem-onstrated the benefits of earlier initiation of ART for reducing both HIV-related and non-HIV–related clinical events. ” Our in-terpretation of the existing literature is that large observational studies have supported the findings from randomized, controlled trials that suggest that ART protects pa