Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date. Dear Doctor ,
I would like to thank you for your educational effort and very
useful help for many people visiting this site.
My question is: Does antigen P24 appear in [the] case of reinfection or superinfection (in case of infected couple living together and having unprotected sex in their blood after having sex ) or does it appear only the first time of contact with the virus ?
Does unprotected sex in such case carry higher risk of faster progress of HIV infection ?
Marty Markowitz, M. D.
Clinical Director
Staff Investigator, Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center
Associate Professor, Rockefeller University
The p24 antigen test is one way to measure circulating virus in the blood.
It is usually easy to detect in new infections for a very short time because the amount of virus is in excess of the antibodies the body makes to the virus. However, the p24 antigen level rapidly becomes non-detectable due to the presence of antibody excess as compared to p24...
It would therefore be unlikely that the p24 antigen test would be a good marker of superinfection.
It is more likely that there would be a rather abrupt change in HIV-1 RNA in an untreated patient....or even a change in T cell count if the superinfecting virus is more aggressive.
Superinfection may result in more rapid progression to symptomatic disease....it would depend on many factors including drug resistance and host and immune responses to the virus....
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