Hemostatic alterations during human immunodeficiency virus infection: a review

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is associated to different clinical and laboratory hemostatic alterations. The most important is thrombocytopenia, which very often leads to a picture indistinguishable from idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura with poor clinical relevance but with possible important problems of differential diagnosis. Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura is sometimes associated to HIV infections, although only few reports there exist. Finally, the high incidence of lupus anticoagulant in some phases of HIV infection has not a clinical relevance, but is essentially a laboratory finding which is to be known because it can cause a prolonged partial thromboplastin time.