Prolegomena to HIV infection and disease staging criteria

From the asymptomatic stage to the stage of full-blown AIDs, HIV-infected subjects show an extremely wide spectrum of clinical signs and a complex sequential pattern of seroimmunological alterations. This explains the difficulties encountered by many students in subdividing HIV-position individuals into groups showing a more or less uniform stage of infection and disease progression. Nevertheless, the need for staging was and still is strongly felt, as it may play an important role, not only for prognostic, but ultimately also for therapeutic purposes. A scoring or a diagram system may thus be hypothesized, allowing a more or less precise staging, according to the number of criteria included; furthermore, in the both systems an "irreversibility threshold" may be drawn as a line beyond which a biomedical severity--rather than a symptom specificity-based AIDS definition may be proposed.