Patient characteristics.

<p>General and disease-specific characteristics of patient groups. Abbreviations: <b>ALT</b>, alanine transaminase; <b>IQR</b>, interquartile range; <b>PI</b>, protease inhibitor; <b>HAART</b>, highly active antiretroviral treatment.</p

Changes in CD8⁺ effector and memory phenotype in all patients and healthy controls.

<p>A: representative plots of a healthy control, HIV-HCV coinfected, HCV monoinfected and HIV- mono patient showing naïve (right lower quadrant), central memory (right upper quadrant), effector memory (left upper quadrant) and effector (left lower quadrant) CD8⁺ T-cells by CD27 and CD45RO staining. B: pie charts of mean percentages of naïve (light grey), central memory (CM; light blue), effector memory (EM; dark blue) and effector (orange) CD8⁺ T-cells in 42 patients and 3 healthy controls. C: relative increase of median percentages of memory subsets compared to healthy controls. D: box plot showing percentages of effector CD8⁺ T-cells in HCV-monoinfected (left) or HIV/HCV-coinfected patients (right) with fibrosis scores F0–F2 (yellow) versus F3–F4 (red). The depicted p-value was calculated with two way ANOVA and indicates statistical significant difference in percentages of effector CD8⁺ T cells in F0–F2 fibrosis compared to F3–F4 fibrosis, independent of coinfection with HIV. Liver fibrosis was assessed with Fibroscan in 74% of HCV monoinfected patients and 71% of HIV/HCV coinfected patients. E: correlation of staining for perforin (Y-axis) with effector phenotype (X-axis) in CD8⁺ T-cells. Box-plots show median, quartiles and range. Line represents linear regression. P-values are depicted as: * (<0.05) and ** (p-value <0.01).</p

Correlations of clinical parameters and T cell markers.

<p>Spearman correlations of HCV-RNA and ALT with expression of activation and exhaustion markers and median expression of these markers in patients with F0–F2 versus F3–F4 fibrosis in all HCV-monoinfected and HIV/HCV-coinfected patients.</p

Representative flow cytometry plots.

<p>Representative flow cytometry plots of T-cell activation- and exhaustion markers in HIV-HCV coinfected patients, HCV mono- and HIV mono-infected patients and healthy controls. A: gating of CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T-cells by lymphocyte-gate (left panel), CD3-gate (middle panel) and gates for CD4⁺ or CD8⁺ T-cells (right panel). B-E: representative flow cytometry plots of a healthy control (left), HIV-HCV coinfected (middle left), HCV monoinfected (middle right) and HIV -monoinfected patient (right) showing (B) activated CD8⁺ T-cells; (C) Fas-positive CD4⁺ T-cells; (D) PD-1 positive CD4⁺ T-cells and (E) Tim-3 positive CD8⁺ T cells. Percentages are depicted in the right upper corner.</p