Acquired antiretroviral drug resistance mutations upon treatment failure in HIV-1 infected pediatric patients in central Brazil

Antiretroviral drug-resistance mutations compromise the successful treatment of children and adolescents infected with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). We describe the clinical, virological, and immunological follow-up of a cohort of children and adolescents perinatally infected with HIV-1 treated at Hospital Estadual de Doenças Tropicais Dr. Anuar Auad ­ HDT, in Central Brazil, after therapeutic failure related to drug resistance mutations. We analyzed the results of the genotypic test (protease codons 1­99 and reverse transcriptase codons 1­325) performed from 2003 to 2015. The ARV susceptibility profile was analyzed according to Stanford HIV drug resistance database. A total of 65 patients (median age of 10 years; range, 18 m­18 y) with therapeutic failure (after a median of 55 months of follow up; range, 9 m­13 y) and plasma levels of HIV-1 RNA greater than 1,000 copies/mL which were included and demonstrated mutations in: nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), 98.5%; non nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs), 75.4%; and protease inhibitors (PI), 44.6%. The most frequent NRTI mutations were found in codon T215 (83.1%) with a predominance of T215Y (56.9%), followed by M184V (69.3%). In the NNRTI class, mutations K103N (36.9%) and 190A (23.1%) were predominant, and, in the protease, mutations 54VL (35.4%) and 82ASTL (32.3%) were found in approximately the same proportion, with a predominance of the M54V mutation. These results demonstrate the high levels of resistance to different classes of antiretrovirals in HIV-infected children and adolescents and the importance of genotypic resistance tests in this population