HEMOCO: A French prospective study of hemophiliacs infected by human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)

HEMOCO is a multicenter prospective cohort set up in 1989 to monitor 407 French hemophiliacs infected by HIV-1 and recruited in 4 hemophilia treatment centers in the Paris region. As of 15 July 1995, 42% of the patients in the cohort had developed stage B HIV disease and 29% stage C disease (AIDS); 23.1% of the patients had died. The cumulative proportion of patients with AIDS was 4.5% at 5 years and 27.4% at 10 years, while the respective mortality rates were 3.8% and 19.5%. In our study, only age was predictive of AIDS, with an estimated relative risk of 1.2 per 10-year age increment; this factor was also predictive of death. After 10 years of follow-up, 6.1% of the study population had no clinical or laboratory signs of immunodepression. The follow-up protocol in the HEMOCO protocol is the same as that in the French SEROCO study, which includes men infected by HIV-1 through sexual contact. This will allow us to compare the progression of HIV infection between these two exposure groups.