Cognitive Screening in HIV-1 Infected Young Adults at Buenos Aires

Preliminary Data

Abstract

Cognitive impairment is highly prevalent in HIV-1 infected patients, even in younger individuals. These symptoms usually are not recognized by health professionals or even patients themselves. However, they can represent a major cause of functional impairment and failure in treatment compliance. In our country we lack both sufficient epidemiological information on the true impact of these symptoms and screening tests with local validation needed to be used by health professionals during the medical assessment. Therefore we designed a prospective study to compare the performance of four brief cognitive tests and a new screening tool with the neuropsychological assessment (gold standard) in a population of young adults infected with HIV-1 in Argentina, in order to assess their sensitivity and specificity in our culture and language. Different confounding conditions were taken into account. Preliminary data were analyzed after the enrollment of 19 subjects. NEURA screening correlated significantly with the neuropsychological assessment (rho = 0.496, p = .031). In terms of sensitivity and specificity, NEURA performance was superior to other screening tests routinely used in our country: IHDS (S 27% / E 5%), MMSE (S / E 0%), ACE (S 9% /E 100%) and IFS (S 36% /E 80%).