Oral white patches in a national sample of medical HIV patients in the era of HAART.
OBJECTIVE
Several types of HIV-related oral mucosal conditions have been reported to occur during the course of HIV disease progression. Of these, few may be manifested as 'white' lesions and many are noticeable to the patient. This paper examines the relationships between social, behavioral and medical aspects of HIV infection and reporting an occurrence of oral white patches (OWP) by HIV-infected patients.


METHODS
The subjects are participants in all three interviews in the HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study (HCSUS). The subjects were selected using a three-stage probability sampling design. The multivariate analysis is based on 2109 subjects with nonmissing binary outcome variable for all three waves representing a national sample of 214 000 individuals. The multivariate model was fitted using generalized estimating equations (GEE) by implementing the XTGEE command in STATA.


RESULTS
We estimate that 75 000 persons (35%) reported at least one incident of OWP, of these 14 000 reported having OWP during all three interviews, and that the rate of reporting declined over the three HCSUS waves. The multivariate analysis showed seven variables that were significant predictors of at least one report of OWP.


CONCLUSIONS
Compared with persons on HAART therapy, patients on other regimens or taking no antiviral medications were 23-46% more likely to report an incident of OWP. Compared with whites, African Americans were 32% less likely to report OWP, while current smokers were 62% more likely than nonsmokers. Being diagnosed with AIDS and having CD4 counts less than 500 significantly increased the likelihood of reporting OWP.
Marcus
Marvin
M
Division of Public Health and Community Dentistry, UCLA School of Dentistry, International Center for Dental Health Policy, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1668, USA. marvm@dent.ucla.edu
Maida
Carl A
CA
Freed
James R
JR
Younai
Fariba
F
Coulter
Ian D
ID
Der-Martirosian
Claudia
C
Liu
Honghu
H
Freed
Benjamin
B
Guzmán-Becerra
Norma
N
Shapiro
Martin
M
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D023241:Antiretroviral Therapy, Highly Active; D002180:Candidiasis, Oral / Q000150:complications / Q000453:epidemiology*; D005006:Ethnicity; D005260:Female; D015658:HIV Infections / Q000150:complications* / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000453:epidemiology; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D017733:Leukoplakia, Hairy / Q000150:complications / Q000453:epidemiology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009061:Mouth Mucosa / Q000473:pathology; D016017:Odds Ratio; D012650:Self Disclosure; D012737:Sex Factors; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology