National sentinel surveillance of transmitted drug resistance in antiretroviral-naive chronically HIV-infected patients in France over a decade: 2001-2011.

OBJECTIVES: As recommended by the French ANRS programme for the surveillance of HIV-1 resistance, we estimated the prevalence of transmitted drug resistance-associated mutations (RAMs) in antiretroviral-naive, chronically HIV-1-infected patients.
METHODS: RAMs were sought in samples from 661 newly diagnosed HIV-1-infected patients in 2010/11 at 36 HIV clinical care centres. Weighted analyses were used to derive representative estimates of the percentage of patients with RAMs.
RESULTS: At patient inclusion, the prevalence of virus with protease (PR) or reverse transcriptase (RT) RAMs was 9.0% (95% CI 6.8%-11.2%). No integrase RAMs were observed. The prevalences of protease inhibitor, nucleoside RT inhibitor and non-nucleoside RT inhibitor RAMs were 1.8%, 6.2% and 2.4%, respectively. Resistance to one, two and three classes of antiretroviral agent was observed in 7.9%, 0.9% and 0.2% of patients, respectively. The frequency of RAMs was higher in patients infected with B compared with non-B subtype virus (11.9% versus 5.1%, P = 0.003). Baseline characteristics (gender, age, country of transmission, CD4 cell count and viral load) were not associated with the prevalence of transmitted RAMs. However, men having sex with men (MSM) were more frequently infected with resistant virus than were other transmission groups (12.5% versus 5.8%, P = 0.003). Compared with the 2006/07 survey, the overall prevalence of resistance remained stable. However, a significant decrease in the frequency of virus with PR RAMs was observed in 2010/11 compared with the 2006/07 survey (1.8% versus 5.0%, P = 0.003).
CONCLUSIONS: In France in 2010/11, the global prevalence of transmitted drug-resistant variants was 9.0%, and the prevalence was stable compared with the 2006/07 survey. MSM and B subtype-infected patients are the groups with a higher prevalence of drug resistance.