Metabolic profiling of HIV infected individuals on an AZT-based antiretroviral treatment regimen reveals persistent oxidative stress

Human immunodeficiency viral (HIV) infection and long-term use of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) have both been associated with the development of metabolic and immunological complications. Despite having many markers for HIV disease progression, the reliability of these markers remains debatable and most of these cannot be used as valid markers for treatment response. As such, it remains important to discover and develop biological markers, which will aid in monitoring disease progression, treatment response and the diagnoses of HIV-related metabolic disorders. Previous HIV-metabonomics studies unravelled the ability to detect and measure potential biological markers of HIV disease progression and treatment response. Several significantly differing metabolites were identified, however, only a small number of studies have investigated the link of specific metabolic disorders to an exact antiretroviral regimen. Here, an NMR-based untargeted metabonomic approach was used to profile metabolic changes in the sera of 24 HIV⁺ cART⁺ individuals receiving Zidovudine-based combination antiretroviral therapy compared to their 15 HIV⁺ ART^- and 38 HIV^- counterparts. Chemometric analysis identified significant differences in metabolic features related to glutamine, glutamate, glutathione, glucose and arginine. Pathway analysis also revealed the glutamine and glutamate metabolism pathway as the most significantly altered pathway between the HIV⁺ cART⁺ and HIV⁺ cART^- group. Findings from this study further confirm the reliability of NMR-based metabonomics in HIV biomarker discovery. In addition, this study contributes to our understandings of the metabolic effect of antiretroviral therapy.