Dang Vu Phuong Linh, Le Thi Kim Anh, Nguyen Thu Hoai, Pham Viet Hung, Nguyen Van Lam, Le Thanh Hai, Dang Minh Diem, Vu Thi Phuong
According to the guidance of the World Health Organization (WHO), children diagnosed with HIV infection should be treated with antiretroviral drugs (ARV) as soon as possible. After 36 period of following-up treatment, up to 21% of HIV infected patients were found to suffer from treatment failure, manifested by reduced CD4 T cell counts and increased HIV viral load. In addition, we also monitored other clinical markers during the course of treatment, therefore, we would like to investigate the alterations of these markers during the course of treatment to understand better the relationship between these clinical markers and the treatment response.The study was designed as nested case-control study, in which, we selected all treatment failure (TF) subjects (54 children) and 47 matched treatment success (TS) subjects, the results were analyzed using Chi-squared and non-parametric tests. The study showed that the number of CD4 T cells, opportunistic infections and Alanine transaminase (ALT) levels during treatment are correlated with the ability to respond to treatment in HIV-infected children. In addition, the responders also recover better in terms of immunological and other biological markers including hemoglobin, platelets, and liver enzymes than non-responders. Therefore, monitoring these markers during the treatment can be beneficial
in prognosis the treatment response.