Response to: ‘Does the prevalence of radiographic hand osteoarthritis in patients with HIV-1 infection increase or not?’ by Luo et al

We thank Luo et al 1 for their interest in our work demonstrating for the first time that patients with HIV-1 infection display radiographic hand osteoarthritis (HOA) more frequently than the general population and that metabolic syndrome (MetS) is an independent factor associated with HOA presence and severity in the setting of HIV-1 infection.2 We would like to respond point-to-point to each comment. Not all confounding factors, such as genetic factors, have been taken into account when we compared the prevalence radiographic HOA between the Framingham and the Metabolic Syndrome and Fibrosis-Osteoarthritis (METAFIB-OA) cohorts as well as between patients with HIV-1 infection w/o MetS in the METAFIB-OA cohort. However, a major purpose of our study was to compare the prevalence of HOA in patients who had HIV-1 infection with that from the Framingham cohort. The Framingham Study has been used as a group representative of the general population in many previous studies including in recent lupus studies. …