ENIGMA-HIV: White matter microstructural abnormalities in a global sample of people living with HIV

COEX 

HIV remains a global public health challenge with an estimated 39 million people living with HIV [1]. Despite widespread access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), neurocognitive impairment is a persistent issue in people living with chronic HIV infection [2]. Persistent HIV viral reservoir instigates an inflammatory cascade that leads to neural dysfunction, often accompanied by white matter (WM) damage. However, clinical and demographic heterogeneity in people with HIV (PwH) worldwide, and variations in MRI acquisition, processing, and analysis methods yielded inconsistencies in reported HIV-related WM differences detected across studies. Here, we pooled diffusion MRI (dMRI) data from ten independent worldwide neuroHIV studies as part of the ENIGMA-HIV consortium [3]; we aimed to identify generalizable WM microstructural associations with infection using standardized data analysis pipelines.