AIDS-defining illnesses among patients with HIV in Singapore, 1985 to 2001: results from the Singapore HIV Observational Cohort Study (SHOCS)

Table 3 Conditions which may have been undiagnosed category C illnesses and important non-category C conditions

Possible category C conditions	New	Recurrent	Total
Pneumonia, cause unknown¹	114	3	117
Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, extracerebral²	25	0	25
Meningitis, cause unknown³	21	0	21
Dementia⁴	20	0	20
Cerebral lesion, cause unknown⁵	18	0	18
Non-category C conditions
Weight loss, >10% bodyweight	379	4⁶	383
Pneumonia, bacterial	102	4⁷	106
Salmonella septicemia	86	0⁸	86
Penicillium marneffei, disseminated	5	1	6

¹Some of these patients died before a diagnosis could be established and others recovered following a mixture of antibacterial and Pneumocystis treatments. Therefore the majority of these cases are likely to be due to bacteria or Pneumocystis carinii infections. ²Histology in these cases was not sufficiently specific to confirm a diagnosis of Burkitt's or immunoblastic lyphoma. ³These patients represent a diverse mixture of cases without a confirmed diagnosis, but they are believed to include mycobacterial, bacterial, viral and fungal infections. ⁴This excludes cases which fulfilled the diagnosis of HIV-related encephalopathy. ⁵Many of these cases died soon after diagnosis and are likely to include a large number of patients with toxoplasmosis of the brain. ⁶Recurrent weight loss indicates that weight was regained and subsequently lost again and not that 20% of body weight was lost. ⁷These cases of recurrence of bacterial pneumonia were not category C conditions as they occurred more than 12 months after the preceding case. ⁸Four cases of recurrent Salmonella septicaemia are included in the "other" category of table 3.

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