Difficulties of Identifying the Early HIV Antibody Seroconversion Period Depending on the Confirmatory Assay.

Background: Identification of HIV infection at the early stage is valuable for patient management, for prevention, and for research purposes. In practice, identification of a recent HIV infection at diagnosis proves challenging after HIV antibody seroconversion but can be suspected using Western blots (WBs) or immunoblots (IBs) as confirmatory assays.

Methods: Five commercially available confirmatory assays were compared using 43 samples from recently infected individuals.