Statistical Analysis of AZT Effect on CD4 Cell Counts in HIV Disease

摘要

We explore the fitting of a class of hierarchical regression models to longitu-dinal CD4 lymphocyte count data from the Edinburgh City Hospital cohort.This mainly drug-using (IDU) cohort provides an excellent resource for thestudy of HIV disease progression for several reasons: seroconversions havebeen estimated for a large proportion of the cohort on the basis of stored seraretrospectively tested for HIV antibodies and knowledge of needle-sharing be-haviour; immunological monitoring has been thorough since 1985 with bloodtaken at most clinic visits and regular attendance behaviour encouraged; im-munological measurements are considered accurate from quality control com-parisons between UK laboratories.