Antiretroviral Therapy, Highly Active CD4 Lymphocyte Count Child Child, Preschool Clinical Trials as Topic Dose-Response Relationship, Drug HIV Infections - drug therapy HIV Infections - immunology HIV Protease Inhibitors - administration & dosage HIV Protease Inhibitors - therapeutic use Humans Infant Ritonavir - administration & dosage Ritonavir - therapeutic use
To evaluate the antiretroviral activity of antiretroviral agents and to compare the effects of two different antiretroviral agents, we propose a non-parametric mixed-effects model to investigate change of CD4+ counts. The proposed model and methods are applied to analyse the data from PACTG345 study. Population and individual patterns of change of CD4+ counts and a reference band are obtained. Our results indicate that treatment with high-dose ritonavir is significantly superior compared with low-dose ritonavir.