Nutritional and Metabolic Disorders in HIV Infected Children and Adolescent

The advent of highly active antiretroviral treatment has resulted in the survival into adolescence of an increasing proportion of infants and children with perinatal HIV infection in Senegal. However, the transformation of HIV into a chronic disease needing lifelong antiretroviral treatment (ART) raises new challenges, among others related to a disturbance of glucose metabolism, lipid abnormalities, in addition to the potential effects on children's growth and puberty. Little is known on nutritional and metabolic changes in HIV-infected children on ART in Africa, while implementation of the latest WHO recommendations should eventually lead to an increase in the number of children on ART in this region. Moreover, bio-clinical evolution of untreated children is poorly documented in the African context. It therefore urgently needed to institute a cohort study to evaluate, in the long term, the impact of HIV infection and/or ART on nutritional and metabolic disorders and to characterize the risk factors of their occurrence in children and adolescents infected as they move through adolescent into adulthood.