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About 1% of HIV-infected patients — “elite controllers” — maintain virologic suppression, sometimes for decades, without antiretroviral therapy (ART). Researchers recently examined the natural history of this phenomenon.
The investigators screened the CASCADE collaboration's 24 seroconverter cohorts to identify elite controllers (defined as ART-naive patients having ≥5 consecutive viral loads <400/500 copies/mL, with the last measurement ≥5 years after seroconversion). Loss of control was defined as a confirmed viral load >2000 copies/mL.
The pooled dataset of 9896 eligible seroconverters yielded 140 elite controllers (1.4%). For the 64 patients with viral load measurements available from within 24 months after seroconversion, the median time…