Aids Manifestations

This chapter discusses HIV infection in infants, children, and adolescents. The information on prevention and transmission, treatment of opportunistic infections, primary therapy, and toxicities from medications is constantly changing and expanding. Adolescence is a developmental stage of life normally characterized by experimentation, risk taking, and sexual exploration within the context of feelings of invulnerability, which makes it a uniquely high-risk period for acquisition of HIV. The latency period from acquisition of HIV infection to development of AIDS in adults suggests that a significant proportion of HIV-infected young adults aged less than 29 years acquired their infection as teenagers. Furthermore, in adolescents, children, and infants older than 18 months, definitive diagnosis of HIV infection is made by using the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and western blot assays, which provide serological confirmatory evidence of a humoral immune response to HIV by detecting HIV-specific IgG antibodies. However, because maternal IgG antibody is transferred to infants across the placenta, all infants born to HIV-infected women are antibody positive at birth.