Abstract
Background and Objectives: In addition to immunological disorders, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) also causes metabolic abnormalities which include insulin resistance, lipodystrophy syndrome and cardiovascular disease. Though successful in viral suppression and immune restoration, continued use of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) has also been linked to the development of several metabolic ailments. Currently, the only clinical markers used to manage and monitor the development of HIV-induced metabolic disorders, disease progression as well as observing individual’s response to antiviral treatment are CD4 count, viral loads and several other single variable colometric assays such as glucose tolerance test. Despite the common use of these clinical markers, these markers remain unreliable and limited in the ability to monitor the development of metabolic disorders as well as monitor treatment response. Given these limitations, it is therefore imperative to discover and develop more reliable biological markers for monitoring HIV disease progression, treatment response and diagnosing HIV and cART-induced metabolic disorders. The lack of approaches for diagnosing and monitoring the development of HIV and cART-induced metabolic disorders has led to the exploration of metabonomics. Metabonomics, which can be defined as the ability to detect and measure multiple metabolites at once, has shown promise in its ability to classify metabolic profiles of HIV infected and uninfected biofluids. Previous HIV-metabonomic studies focused on studying the ability of metabonomics in detecting and identifying metabolites disturbed by HIV and/cART. Some metabolites accountable for the discrimination between HIV-infected and uninfected sera have been identified; however only a small number of research studies have reported on the assignment of particular metabolic changes to specific drug regimens. As such, the objective of this study was to profile metabolic changes in the sera and plasma of HIV-infected individuals receiving a first-line tenofovir-based combination antiretroviral therapy compared to their treatment-naïve counterparts...
M.Sc. (Biochemistry)