LAUSR

Despite virological suppression, some HIV-infected patients can not restore their CD4+ T lymphocytes after anti-retroviral therapy (ART). These individuals are known as immune non-responders (INRs). INRs are at high risk of developing AIDS and non-AIDS-related events and have a shorter life expectancy. Hence, it is vital to identify INR early and prevent its complications, but there are still no specific diagnostic indicators or models. Ferroptosis is a lately reported kind of programmed cell death, which plays an indispensable part in diverse diseases. However, its particular regulatory mechanisms remain unclear, and its function in the pathogenic process of defective immunological recovery is still unknown. Blood is mainly used for rapid diagnosis because it enables quick testing. To investigate the role of ferroptosis-related genes (FRGs) in the early detection of INR, we scrutinized Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) datasets of peripheral blood samples to estimate the effectiveness of FRGs for INR's early diagnosis. To our knowledge, for the first time, gene expression data were utilized in this study to discover six FRGs that were expressed explicitly in patients' peripheral blood with INR. Later on, multiple machine-supervised learning algorithms were employed, and a superlative diagnostic model for INR was built with random forest, which displayed satisfactory diagnostic efficiency in the training cohort (area under the curve (AUC) = 0.99) and one external validation cohort (AUC = 0.727). Our findings suggest that FRGs are implicated in the development of defective immune recovery, presenting a potential route for early detection and potential biological targets for the most effective treatment of defective immune recovery.