Some results on the probability distributions of times to pre-AIDS and AIDS (Q1206172)

The human immunodeficiency virus ( HIV) is nowadays one of the major public health problems in both developed and developing countries. All forecasts indicate that the current numbers of ill and dead people will increase in the next years. Important questions from the public health viewpoint are how the disease of AIDS develops and how to control AIDS epidemics. Dividing the AIDS progression into five irreversible stages (such as infected but antibody negative, antibody positive but asymptomatic, pre-AIDS symptoms, clinical symptoms and death from AIDS) and using a time-homogeneous Markov model, in this paper the probability distributions of times to pre-AIDS symptoms, to clinical AIDS and to death from AIDS are derived under various conditions. The specific conditions concern random HIV-antibody tests or no testing, and the extension of the distribution results to cases involving left censoring and central interval censoring. On the basis of these results the expectations and the variances of the times to pre-AIDS symptoms, to clinical AIDS and to death are derived. Furthermore, expressions for the expectation of the incubation periods under the above mentioned conditions are derived. Finally, all these results are illustrated numerically and graphically.