Background
Comparisons of HIV-1 disease between women and men have demonstrated that given the same viral load, measured early in HIV-1 infection, the time to AIDS progression is faster in women than in men. There is increasing consensus that faster disease progression is associated with elevated immune activation and this is consistent with our recent findings that women have higher immune activation then men given the same HIV-1 viral load. Plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) appear to play a central role in this HIV-1-induced activation of the immune system, as they can sense HIV-1 ssRNA via Toll-like receptor (TLR) 7 and produce proinflammatory cytokines.