sensitivity – when referring to the accuracy of a test result, sensitivity refers to the proportion of people with an illness or disease who have a positive test result.
If a test has low sensitivity, then false-negative results are the concern – where people have a condition but it is missed.
If a test has high sensitivity, then people are accurately diagnosed – and only a few people are missed.
For a serious condition, high sensitivity is essential to be able to identify people early.
Online calculator.
See specificity.
sensitivity – when referring to the activity of a drug, sensitive means that a drug still works. As resistance develops a drug becomes less sensitive.
A complete loss of sensitivity implies that a drug is no longer working.
It also means that your partner may benefit from counselling.
morbidity – medical term for illness.
elite controller (EC) – if your viral load stays undetectable for more than five years without ART you are an elite controller.
Elite controllers also have a very good CD4 count (always above 500 cells/mm3) that stays at a similar level over many years.
Even with this good immune response, ART is still generally recommended in the long-term.
This is because over decades – some ECs have been undetectable for more than 20 years – there is a concern that low level HIV in different body compartments like the brain, might lead to accumulative serious damage that isn’t easy to detect until it is too late.
This is a real concern, though evidence is limited because of the rarity of ECs.
See: long-term slow progressor (LTSP)/long-term non-progessor (LTNP).
outreach – a type of service which goes out to find and engage people.
base – (also called nucleotide) – the building blocks in DNA that form amino acids. There are four bases represented by the letters A (adenine), T (thymine), C (cytosine) and G (guanine). In RNA the T is replaced by U (uricil).
Genetics, HIV structure and life cycle
