The overarching goal of this project is to identify and characterize genetic determinants of HIV 1 susceptibility and resistance in samples of African American (AA) and European American (EA) injection drug users (IDUs) by conducting (1) a case/control genome-wide association (GWA) study of HIV 1 infection (positive/negative); (2) a case-only GWA study of viral load among HIV+ IDUs. The study uses existing samples and data from Urban Health Study (UHS) (PI: Alex Kral), which was the longest-running study of street-recruited IDUs in North America, from 1986-2005. UHS was a serial, cross-sectional sero-epidemiological study. Data were collected every 6 months in communities with a high prevalence of injection drug use in the San Francisco Bay Area. It used targeted sampling in neighborhoods at easily accessible community field sites, such as churches, single room occupancy hotels, and community centers. Eligibility criteria for initial entry to the study were (1) injection drug use in past 30 days; (2) ability to provide informed consent; and (3) age 18 or older. The UHS cohort ... (Show More)

The overarching goal of this project is to identify and characterize genetic determinants of HIV 1 susceptibility and resistance in samples of African American (AA) and European American (EA) injection drug users (IDUs) by conducting (1) a case/control genome-wide association (GWA) study of HIV 1 infection (positive/negative); (2) a case-only GWA study of viral load among HIV+ IDUs. The study uses existing samples and data from Urban Health Study (UHS) (PI: Alex Kral), which was the longest-running study of street-recruited IDUs in North America, from 1986-2005. UHS was a serial, cross-sectional sero-epidemiological study. Data were collected every 6 months in communities with a high prevalence of injection drug use in the San Francisco Bay Area. It used targeted sampling in neighborhoods at easily accessible community field sites, such as churches, single room occupancy hotels, and community centers. Eligibility criteria for initial entry to the study were (1) injection drug use in past 30 days; (2) ability to provide informed consent; and (3) age 18 or older. The UHS cohort includes over 9,000 African American and European American IDUs whose serum samples have been stored and data are available on HIV antibody status, HIV risk behaviors, drug abuse and demographics.

The current study includes 985 HIV+ cases and 5,222 HIV- controls. Approximately six HIV- controls per case were frequency matched on: (1) self-reported ancestry; (2) sex; (3) age; (4) year of ascertainment; and (5) HIV risk class. This GWAS (DA026141) was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA; PI: Eric O. Johnson). Funding support for genotyping, which was performed at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR), was provided by NIDA and the NIH contract "High throughput genotyping for studying the genetic contributions to human disease"(HHSN268200782096C).

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