Individual Disease Progression Module for Population Event History Simulation

Samuel J. Clark, University of Colorado at Boulder and University of the Witwatersrand
Alex Welte, University of the Witwatersrand

Within Southern Africa there is a fierce debate on issues surrounding treatment and prevention of HIV, in part because the costs and benefits of different treatment protocols are difficult to assess and rationalize. Because transmission of HIV in Africa primarily occurs between two individuals during sex or at birth, the Individual-level simulation approach is one of the only methods capable of shedding significant light on these debates, because it can model both the behavioural and biological factors governing the transmission of HIV between individuals. Critical to this approach are good models of ‘within host’ disease progression of HIV. These parameterize the time course of the critical biomarkers associated with HIV infection and allow them to be manipulated in ways that reflect different treatment protocols. This work discusses a general individual-level disease progression model capable of rapid reconfiguration to accommodate a wide range of arbitrary disease progression models.