Chikungunya outbreak (2015) in the Colombian Caribbean: Latent classes and gender differences in virus infection

摘要

The Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infection is a mosquito-borne virus of the Togaviridae family, part of the arbovirus group of mosquito-transmitted pathogens. CHIKV causes a severe and debilitating disease with high morbidity. In this study, we comprehensively analysed clinical data from 1160 individuals from the Colombian Caribbean, who were diagnosed with CHIKV infection during the 2014 epidemic peak and before the Zika epidemic (registered back in 2015). Further, the presence of latent classes and predictors of CHIKV susceptibility and severity of the CHIKV infection were analysed. Although it is well known that people respond differently to infection, our results showed that these differences are not arbitrary and may come from the specific orchestration of our immune response and specific genetic makeup. For example, we identified that females infected with CHIKV exhibited significant and heterogeneous phenotypic response patterns compared to men. Overall, these results inform about potential predictors and outlining strategies to study the natural history of CHIKV infection. Future studies assessing the contribution of demographic, immunological and genetic factors to symptom co-occurrence could shed some light on the severity of the clinical symptomatology and, ultimately, lead to more accurate, more efficient and differential diagnosis. These results could contribute to the development of machine learning approaches to characterizing CHIKV infection in other populations and provide more accurate and differential diagnosis.