D. Florea 1,2, Simona Paraschiv 1, Mihaela Frăţilă 1, L. Prisăcaru 3, Cristina Nicolau 3, Irina Teodorescu 3, Elena Duca 4, Carmen Dorobăţ 2,3, D. Oţelea 1
1 National Institute for Infectious Diseases “Prof Dr Matei Balş” Bucharest;
2 University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Gr T Popa “ Iasi;
3 HIV/AIDS Regional Centre Iasi;
4 Public Health Direction Iasi
Abstract
Objective. To evaluate the prevalence of resistance mutations in antiretroviral (ARV) treatment- naïve patients from the north-eastern region of Romania. Methods. Adult patients from the HIV/ AIDS Regional Centre of Iasi were investigated between January 2007 and June 2008. HIV genotyping was performed by using the ViroSeq Genotyping System. The prevalence of transmitted resistance was calculated by using the WHO recommended list of mutations. Results. Fifty patients were included in the study. Most of them were late presenters, 56% had AIDS. Subtype F1 predominated, although other subtypes (B, C and CRF02_AG) were detected. A statistical significant association between older patients, risk-related behaviour and non-F1 subtype infection was found. In the 41 HIV sequences analyzed, only two resistance related mutations were detected: T215S (2 cases) and K103N (1 case). Conclusions. The transmitted HIV resistance has low prevalence and is limited to single NRTI and NNRTI resistance mutations. These results might be influenced by the large proportion of late presenters in the studied group, with a much higher prevalence in recently infected cases.