Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Newsday - February 28, 2002
Laurie Garrett, Staff Writer
Dr. Harold Burger, of the New York State Wadsworth Laboratory in Albany, and his team found a statistically highly significant set of genetic differences between HIV-positive and HIV-negative American women, which are most sharply seen when comparing women by race.
Their study focuses on 2,047 HIV-positive women, compared with a pool of 558 race- and age-matched HIV-negative women. The women came from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The Burger team focused on a genetic mutation that had previously been shown in men to be protective against HIV infection. The mutant gene, called delta-32, if inherited from both parents, results in an abnormal, and in this case protective, receptor called ccR5 on the surface of their cells.
The mutant delta-32 form cannot be recognized by HIV, therefore the virus cannot infect the cell.
An individual who has the heterozygous form of the gene, meaning inheriting the mutation from only one parent, can be infected, but some studies in men have indicated that they are less likely to rapidly develop the lethal disease after infection.
The Burger study is the first to examine a large pool of women for the mutation, and to compare the women by race.
Overall, the researchers discovered that all HIV-negative women were about twice as likely to have the protective delta-32 gene than were infected women.
"This is almost a no-brainer," Burger said. "This gene in heterozygous form confers partial protection against HIV. So if you've got it, you're partially protected. If you're in a population group that doesn't have that protection, you're at greater risk."
White women carry the heterozygous form of delta-32 far more frequently than any other women. About 1.2 percent of all white women who are HIV-negative carry the mutant gene. Only 0.6 percent of the HIV-infected white women carry the gene.
Only 0.2 percent of HIV-negative African-American women carry the delta-32 gene. And among those who are HIV-positive, the frequency of delta- 32 is only 0.1 percent, or half as much.
Contrary to what has been suggested in studies of men, being delta- 32 heterozygous doesn't appear to affect the ultimate disease outcome of HIV infection in women, Burger said. It does, however, significantly affect the likelihood of getting infected in the first place.
"This supports mathematical predictions that having a low frequency of delta-32 in non-Caucasians may render those populations vulnerable to far greater and more explicit HIV epidemics," Burger said in a presentation yesterday at the Ninth Annual Retrovirus Conference in Seattle. "And it may explain, in part, the rapid epidemics we see unfolding in Asia and Africa."
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