Factors associated with incident self-reported AIDS among women enrolled in the Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS)

We evaluated factors associated with incident self-reported AIDS diagnoses among HIV-infected women in the Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS), Basel ine information included age, race/ethnicity, HIV risk category, site of en rollment, years of education, cigarette smoking, CD4 cell count, and HIV vi ral load. Baseline and follow-up data on self-reported AIDS were analyzed u sing chi-square, Kaplan-Meier, and Cox proportional hazard models. Among th e 1397 HIV-infected women who reported being free of clinical AIDS at basel ine, 335 women (24%) reported an incident AIDS diagnosis during follow-up. In stratified Kaplan-Meier analyses, the development of self-reported AIDS was significantly associated with baseline CD4 cell count and viral load (p < 0.01). In multivariate Cox proportional hazard analyses, women were stat istically more likely to report AIDS if they had CD4 cell counts below 195 cells/mm(3) (p < 0.01), HIV RNA >4000 copies/ml (p < 0.01), were current sm okers (p < 0.01), and had "no identifiable risk" for acquisition of EW (p = 0.03). Self-reports of a clinical AIDS diagnosis may not always be accurat e, but laboratory markers of HIV disease indicate that those women who self -report such diagnoses have greater immunodeficiency and a higher viral loa d when compared with those who report no AIDS-defining diagnoses.