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Before the advent of potent combination antiretroviral therapy (ART), neurological disease, including HIV-associated dementia (HAD), was common in HIV-infected individuals. How prevalent is such disease in the current HIV treatment era? Baseline data from the NIH-supported CHARTER study provide some insight.
A total of 1555 HIV-infected patients at six U.S. academic centers underwent extensive neurocognitive testing and psychiatric evaluation; 71% were receiving combination ART. Patients were categorized according to whether they had comorbidities that could cause neurocognitive impairment: 15% had confounding comorbidities severe enough to preclude diagnosing HIV-associated neurological disease, 30% had potentially contributing comorbiditie…