부산대학교 도서관

Background: The study analysed 1711 patients of the Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Warsaw diagnosed with HIV infection in 2008–2010 and 2016–2018. Research was conducted examining the changes in CD4 cell counts before starting antiretroviral (ARV) treatment in order to find people who were misclassified as late‐diagnosed. Methods: Patients with late diagnosis were distinguished on the basis of the consensus definition. The Mann–Whitney U‐test was used to analyse the change in CD4 cell counts before starting ARV treatment. Results: In the years 2008–2010, the CD4 count was remeasured before starting ARV treatment in 90 late‐diagnosed patients. The median change in the CD4 count was 22 cells/μL. In 49 of these, the number of CD4 cells spontaneously increased before the start of treatment. We can suspect that these patients were misclassified as late‐diagnosed. Conclusions: The consensus definition of late diagnosis often leads to overestimation of the number of late‐diagnosed patients. The crucial problem is a transient decline in the CD4 lymphocyte count in the acute phase of HIV infection. A potential solution is to introduce serum HIV viral load measurement into the definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]