Cognitive deficits and emotional disorders in HIV-1 infected individuals

The associations between cognitive functioning, depression questionnaire results, and diagnosed psychiatric disorders were examined among 85 HIV-1 infected patients at different stages of systemic infection and 39 seronegative controls. An affective scale and a somatic scale of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were used to measure depression. Psychiatric disorders before or after the diagnosis of seropositivity were evaluated. The patients with symptomatic HIV-1 infection (AIDS related complex, AIDS) reported more somatic symptoms of depression than the subjects with asymptomatic infection or the controls, whereas psychological depression and psychiatric disorders were unrelated to the severity of HIV-1 disease. Psychiatric disorders diagnosed during HIV-1 disease were slightly associated with poor verbal memory only among symptomatic patients. Impaired visual memory showed an association with depressive mood and with psychiatric disorders preceding the diagnosis of seropositivity which suggests that factors other than HIV-1 may explain these subjects' poor visual memory.