We included 93 youths aged between 15 and 24 years who had been perinatally infected with HIV. Among aviremic patients, the duration of viral suppression was shorter in CD8 responders than in CD8 nonresponders medians: 54 vs.
In multivariate analyses including sex and HIV-1 subtype as covariables, Gag-specific CD4 T-cell proliferation was associated only with ethnicity, whereas Gag-specific CD8 T-cell proliferation was associated with both ethnicity and the duration of viral suppression. However, these associations were not significant in multivariate analysis. In conclusion, after at least 15 years of HIV infection, Gag-specific T-cell proliferation was found to be more frequent in black youths than in patients of other ethnic groups, despite all the patients being born in the same country, with similar access to care.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, the decision to publish, or the preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The children infected with HIV at the beginning of the epidemic are now reaching adolescence and adulthood [ 1 ]. Despite the tremendous clinical benefits of combined therapy, suboptimal immune restoration may account for the high rates of some cancers or weaker responses to vaccines in these individuals [ 2 , 3 ].
Immune restoration in infants and children is governed by specific features of HIV pathogenesis, such as viral replication and thymic activity, both of which are higher in these patients, and by treatment issues specific to pediatric patients, such as the earlier initiation of ART to prevent rapid clinical progression, and poorer adherence [ 4 β 6 ]. Immune restoration has been poorly characterized, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in young adults who were infected during the perinatal period.
