Two paired samples of blood and semen were collected four weeks apart. Spearman rho tests were used to estimate correlations between bpVL and spVL. Ten men were enrolled. Similar results were found at D This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The funder had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The present study included 10 HIC men enrolled in the cohort. Sexually transmitted infections STI were systematically looked for and patients were excluded if having symptoms of STI. Semen samples were collected in sterile containers by self-masturbation after a recommended hour abstinence period then sent, within 4 hours of collection, to the Virology Laboratory.
NSC were harvested as described elsewhere [ 10 ]. Demographic and immuno-virological characteristics at the time of measurements were described by the median and interquartile range for continuous variables, and frequency and percentages for discrete variables. In the sensitive analyses, we chose two strategies. The main and the sensitive analyses yielded same results. Wilcoxon rank sum tests were used to compare quantitative characteristics at D0.
Ten men were enrolled between December and October ; their main characteristics being: median time since HIV diagnosis was 11 years 8β18 , median time of control None had symptoms suggestive of STI. During the period of control, 4 patients had no blip, 4 patients had only 1 blip, 1 patient had 3 blips and the last one had 4 blips. No patient had a suspicion or a confirmation of escape.
Results are summarized in Table 1. As HIV-RNA shedding in semen has been previously found to be intermittent [ 5 ], we collected two paired samples of blood and semen four weeks apart, and results were very consistent at each period.
