NIAID/NIH, SETH PINCUS, ELIZABETH FISCHER, AUSTIN ATHMANHIV enters the brain early in the course of infection and begins to evolve separately from the blood-based viral population as early as 140 days after initial infection, according to a study published last week (March 26) in PLoS Pathogens.
Researchers from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University of California, San Francisco, and Yale analyzed cerebral spinal fluid and blood from 72 HIV-positive patients who were not being treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART). The scientists found that 30 percent of the patients either had replicating viruses or signs of inflammation in their spinal fluid, and that these symptoms persisted for varying amounts of time in 16 percent of the patients, suggesting an ongoing infection.
The researchers also sequenced the viral genomes from approximately half of the patients. From five months after infection to the two-year end point of the study, 20 percent of those 33 patients had developed mutations in the population of virus residing in the brain that differed from the ...
