Heterosexuals with HIV have lower CD4 counts at diagnosis than their gay and bisexual male peers, according to an analysis of more than 300,000 people living with HIV globally.
"It was quite a startling finding for us, because it's now telling everybody, 'Look, if you have MSM [men who have sex with men] coming into your clinic, expect CD4 counts at diagnosis to be higher than if the person got the infection as a heterosexual,' " Narendra Dixit, PhD, senior fellow at the Indian Institute of Science's Centre for Biosystems Science and Engineering, in Bangalore, India, told Medscape Medical News.
And that means, he said, that the pattern may appear in local clinics.
"If they find that there are differences in the CD4 counts between heterosexuals and MSMs, they should not be surprised anymore," he said.
Dixit proposed that the reason for this may be that the viruses transmitted among heterosexuals are more virulent, but the study didn't provide evidence of that.
Immune Health at HIV Diagnosis
In this study, which was published online March 10 in PLOS Pathogens,Dixit and colleague Anathu James, PhD, a data scientist and an epidemiologist at the Indian Institute of Science, culled data from 337,119 people captured in studies in the UK, the US, Europe, Australia, and China.
