An observational study identifying highly tuberculosis-exposed, HIV-1-positive but persistently TB, tuberculin and IGRA negative persons with M. tuberculosis specific antibodies in Cape Town, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection is inferred from positive results of T-cell immune conversion assays measuring Mtb-specific interferon gamma production or tuberculin skin test (TST) reactivity. Certain exposed individuals do not display T-cell immune conversion in these assays and do not develop TB. Here we report a hitherto unknown form of this phenotype: HIV-1-positive persistently TB, tuberculin and IGRA negative (HITTIN). Methods: A community-based case-control design was used to systematically screen and identify adults living with HIV (HIV+), aged 3560 years, who met stringent study criteria, and then longitudinally followed up for repeat IGRA and TST testing. Participants had no history of TB despite living in TB hyper-endemic environments in Cape Town, South Africa with a provincial incidence of 681/100,000. Mtb-specific antibodies were measured using ELISA and Luminex. Findings: We identified 48/286 (17%) individuals who tested persistently negative for Mtb-specific T-cell immunoreactivity (three negative Quantiferon results and one TST = 0mm) over 206 154 days on average. Of these, 972% had documented CD4 counts<200 prior to antiretroviral therapy (ART). They had received ART for 70 30 years with a latest CD4 count of 5058 1914 cells/mm 3 . All HITTIN sent for further antibody testing (n=38) displayed Mtb-specific antibody titres. Interpretation: Immune reconstituted HIV+ persons can be persistently non-immunoreactive to TST and interferon-g T-cell responses to Mtb, yet develop species-specific antibody responses. Exposure is evidenced by Mtb-specific antibody titres. Our identification of HIV+ individuals displaying a persisting lack of response to TST and IGRA T-cell immune conversion paves the way for future studies to investigate this phenotype in the context of HIV-infection that so far have received only scant attention.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".