Cognitive screening in hiv-1 infected young adults at Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

Neurocognitive disorders are highly prevalent in HIV-1 infected patients, even in younger individuals. In our country we lack both sufficient epidemiological information on the true impact of these disorders and screening tests with the local validation needed to be used for diagnosis. Therefore we designed a prospective study to estimate the prevalence of these disorders and to compare the performance of five brief cognitive tests between them (including a new screening tool named NEURA with each of its components validated in spanish) and with the complete neuropsychological assessment (gold standard) in a young adult HIV-1 infected population from Argentina, in order to assess their sensitivity and specificity in our language and culture. Different confounding conditions were taken into account. From 02/2015 to 02/2016 native spanish-speakers outpatients, among 18-50 years, with a minimum of 12 years of formal education, under stable antiretroviral therapy and virological suppression were enrolled. They completed: a psychiatric interview; five brief cognitive screening tests; the neuropsychological battery and a functional assessment. We include 45 patients, with a prevalence of neurocognitive impairment (NCI) of 9% (n=4). In terms of sensitivity and specificity, NEURA performance was superior to the comparative tests (75% and 98%, respectively).

We observed a lower prevalence of NCI in our population compared with those reported in young adult aviremic cohort studies. NEURA test seems to be a rapid and more accurate screening test than others routinely used in our country.