Linkage of viral sequences among HIV-infected village residents in Botswana: estimation of linkage rates in the presence of missing data.

ABSTRACT: Linkage analysis is useful in investigating disease transmission dynamics and the effect of interventions on them, but estimates of probabilities of linkage between infected people from observed data can be biased downward when missingness is informative. We investigate variation in the rates at which subjects' viral genotypes link across groups defined by viral load (low/high) and antiretroviral treatment (ART) status using blood samples from household surveys in the Northeast sector of Mochudi, Botswana. The probability of obtaining a sequence from a sample varies with viral load; samples with low viral load are harder to amplify. Pairwise genetic distances were estimated from aligned nucleotide sequences of HIV-1C env gp120. It is first shown that the probability that randomly selected

SUBMITTER: Carnegie NB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3886896 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature