HIV and ID Observations

February 3rd, 2012

More on Low (but Detectable) Viral Loads — Is Knowing This Useful?

I have a very smart, very experienced colleague — clue, his initials are CC, and he doesn’t pitch for the Yankees — who continues to use bDNA testing for HIV viral load monitoring. You know, the assay with a lower limit of detection of 75 copies. He knows that bDNA is less sensitive than PCR. He knows […]

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September 24th, 2011

Warning: Viral Replication is Hazardous to Your Health

When studies evaluate the prognostic importance of measuring HIV viral load, they generally do so by assessing a single measurement rather than values obtained longitudinally.  One obvious limitation of this approach is that baseline VL poorly predicts outcome after ART initiation — a finding in stark contrast to the original description of VL from the […]

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March 20th, 2009

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow …

Since providers — especially doctors — are notoriously poor at predicting medication adherence, here’s some good news: In a paper from the Women’s Interagency Health Study, protease inhibitor levels in hair samples were the strongest independent predictor of virologic success — better than self-reported adherence, age, race, baseline viral load and CD4 cell count, and […]

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