Neuropsychological Deficits in Adult HIV Infected Postnatally: a Pilot Study in Patients with Hemophilia

Despite advances in the management of HIV infection with the introduction of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), it is well known that HIV can directly infect the central nervous system (CNS) and, as a result neuropsychological impairments can be manifested. However, in literature there are contrasting results on which cognitive functions are mainly affected, especially when different HIV seropositive populations are considered. In this study, we seek to determine whether seropositivity is associated with a poor neuropsychological performance in patients infected postnatally, namely haemophilic patients. The results suggest that HIV infection is associated with deficits in attention, short term spatial memory, phonemic fluency, abstraction and visual recognition. Such results have important implications for day-to-day functioning, as the level of impairment detected may cause difficulties in completing common everyday tasks.