Objective: To study the relationship among clinical symptoms and biological markers as predictive value of progression to death in HIV-1 vertically infected infants.
Patient and methods: We carry out a prospective study in 43 HIV-1 infants with a mean age of 4.27 (range: 0-11.8 months). None of the infants' mothers had received any antiviral treatment during pregnancy. None of the infants were breastfed. They were routinely assessed for clinical symptoms during follow-up.
Results: Cox regression analysis was used to study the hazard ratio (HR) of progression to death. For the median viral load > 5 log10, the HR was 6.42 (95% CI, 1.28-32.03) (p = 0.023) and 6.84 (95% CI, 1.52-30,69) (p = 0.012) for biological phenotype of viral isolates with rapid replication and high titter (R/H-X4). We also study the predictive value of the clinical symptoms and we observe that the symptoms with more HR of progression to death were the progressive encephalopathy (3.60 [95% CI, 0.92-14.06; p = 0.065]) and the cardiopathy (6.29 [95% CI, 1.59-24.85; p = 0.008]).
Conclusions: Our data indicate that viral load > 5 log10 and biological phenotype R/H-X4 of virus isolates along the study are predictive markers of progression to death. In addition, the progressive encephalopathy and cardiopathy were also markers of progression death.