59 (post-operative infection; n=166), and no indication of specific organism, were excluded from analyses. A 15-day period

between dates of bacteraemia/septicaemia MS-275 datasheet diagnoses was required to distinguish different episodes; thus, bacteraemia diagnoses recorded for several consecutive days were considered as a single episode. More specific information, such as whether the infection was community-acquired or nosocomial, was not available. HIV transmission risk factors included injection drug use (IDU), men who have sex with men (MSM) and heterosexual transmission (HET). Patients with both IDU and a second risk factor were classified as IDU. HAART was defined as the concomitant use of three antiretroviral drugs: either three nucleoside/nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), or three drugs from two of the following classes: NRTIs, nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs), protease inhibitors (PIs) or fusion inhibitors. In addition, we measured CD4 cell count and HIV-1 RNA using the first values recorded in each year of the study. Insurance was categorized as private, Medicaid, Medicare, uninsured and other/unknown. Patients receiving Ryan White (a US federally funded programme aimed at providing

care for low-income, uninsured and under-insured people living with HIV infection) were classified Antiinfection Compound Library purchase as uninsured. Those recorded as self-pay and those covered by local governmental programmes (e.g. county relief) were also considered to be uninsured. Descriptive analyses of the demographic and clinical characteristics of the study patients

were conducted, including gender, age (18–29, 30–39, 40–49 and ≥50 years), race/ethnicity (White non-Hispanic, Black non-Hispanic, Hispanic, other, or missing), HIV transmission risk factor, CD4 count (<50, 51–200, 201–350, 351–500 or >500 cells/μL), HIV-1 RNA (≤400, 401–1000, 1001–10 000, 10 001–100 000 or >100 000 HIV-1 RNA copies/mL), receipt of HAART and insurance. To retain patients in analyses, categories of ‘missing’ were included for race, risk factor, insurance, CD4 cell count and HIV-1 RNA. Age, CD4 cell count, HIV-1 RNA and insurance were all time-varying covariates; for descriptive analyses, we used the first selleck monoclonal humanized antibody value in the year of HIVRN enrolment, which was 2000 for those enrolled prior to that year. Each patient contributed multiple observations, one for each calendar year under observation. Patients could enrol in a clinic at any time preceding or during the observation period (1 January 2000 to 31 December 2008), and thus the number of person-years was not constant across patients. The mean observation period per patient was 4.16 years (median 3 years), with a range of 1–9 years. Within each year, we calculated the number of months of exposure. If a patient enrolled in a given year, the number of months prior to enrolment was excluded from the count of number of months of exposure for that year.