Information on the ocular findings in pediatric patients with HIV infection has appeared limited in the literature,1 and hence this study was designed to evaluate this situation in Brazil.
A retrospective review of 111 charts of children below the age of 13 years, admitted to the Pediatric Infectious Disease Service of Ribeirão Preto Clinical Hospital between July and December 2004, was performed after approval of the Local Ethics Committee. This hospital serves a population of more than one million people, including urban and rural areas. All patients were seropositive for HIV, in which 65 patients (59%) were confirmed as having AIDS. The male/female proportion was 0.63 : 1, and mean age was 2.2±2.5 years. One hundred and two patients (93%) had HIV vertical transmission and nine (7%) had unknown transmission. All 65 AIDS patients and the other 31 (27.9%) patients who have complained of eye problems underwent ophthalmic examination, and 19 (19.8%) of those examined had ocular pathologic findings that were summarized with their CDC classification in Table 1.
Before HAART, the incidence of ocular manifestation in adult patients with AIDS ranged in Brazil from 50 to 80%, and after that it is less than 56%.2 In most studies, including Brazil, ocular manifestations related to HIV infection in children is much less frequent than those seen in adults. Although some pediatric studies of the pre-HAART era have shown incidence of 7.7–54.0% of ocular findings,1, 3, 4 few works considered these incidence in Brazil, with lack of Brazilian studies in the post-HAART era. Unpublished data have shown 14% of fundoscopic findings in pediatric patients with AIDS in 1999.5 This prevalence was higher than others described in Brazil.2
In this study, the incidence of ocular manifestations was 19.8% considering all HIV pediatric patients examined. This incidence is not too low when compared with those observed in previous studies,4 although most of our findings are common among HIV-negative children (16/96 (16.7%)). Interestingly, only three C3 patients (3/96 (3.1%)) had showed fundoscopic findings, including CMV infection. To our knowledge, this work is the first specific study on ocular findings in Brazilian pediatric HIV patients in the post-HAART era.
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Almeida, F., Paula, J., Martins, M. et al. Ocular manifestations in pediatric patients with HIV infection in the post-HAART era in southern Brazil. Eye 21, 1017–1018 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.eye.6702861
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.eye.6702861
