Intermittent viraemia and immune reconstitution in patients with more than 10–15 years of antiretroviral therapy: baseline values still matter

Gesa Erdbeer
Michael Sabranski
Ina Sonntag
Albrecht Stoehr
Heinz-A Horst
Andreas Plettenberg
Knud Schewe
Stefan Unger
Hans-J Stellbrink
Stefan Fenske
Christian Hoffmann

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Publication date

November 2014

DOI

10.7448/IAS.17.4.19689

Publisher

Wiley

ISSN

1758-2652

Journal

1758-2652

Abstract

Introduction: Data on patients with long-term exposure to ART is scarce because controlled studies usually do not follow up patients for more than five to seven years. We were interested whether baseline parameters such as CD4 T-cell nadir or pre-treatment viraemia do have an impact on ART success after more than a decade of treatment. Methods: ELBE is a cross-sectional study on adult HIV+ patients presenting consecutively with viral suppression (<50 HIV RNA copies/mL) and with ART exposure of at least five years. In this sub-analysis, all patients with more than 10 years of ART exposure were evaluated for immune reconstitution and for intermittent transient viraemia (50–1000 copies/mL, defined as “blips”) during the last five years. Result...