Prognostic classification for AIDS patients in Brazil.

We studied the survival rates and the prognostic variables that corresponded to death during hospitalization in 312 AIDS CDC group IV patients in São Paulo. Discriminant analysis proved to be a good tool to perform the exploratory data analysis that guided the survival analysis groups. It selected nine variables that were important in the progress of the disease: age, time elapsed from the first manifestations of the disease, gender, infection by helminths, number of risk groups to which the patient belonged, number of infections by fungi, history of transfusion, presence of esophageal candidiasis, and infection by Cryptosporidium sp. Although some of these variables may be of limited importance in developed countries, and some variables that we expected to be important were not present in the final discriminant function, we believe these results may guide future research in prognosis of death in hospitalized AIDS patients.