Global Properties of Cytokine-Enhanced HIV-1 Dynamics Model with Adaptive Immunity and Distributed Delays

In this paper, we study a model that enhances our understanding of cytokine-influenced HIV-1 infection. The impact of adaptive immune response (cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) and antibodies) and time delay on HIV-1 infection is included. The model takes into account two types of distributional delays, (i) the delay in the HIV-1 infection of CD4+T cells and (ii) the maturation delay of new virions. We first investigated the fundamental characteristics of the system, then found the system’s equilibria. We derived five threshold parameters, ℜi, i = 0, 1,…, 4, which completely determine the existence and stability of the equilibria. The Lyapunov method was used to prove the global asymptotic stability for all equilibria. We illustrate the theoretical results by performing numerical simulations. We also performed a sensitivity analysis on the basic reproduction number ℜ0 and identified the most-sensitive parameters. We found that pyroptosis contributes to the number ℜ0, and then, neglecting it will make ℜ0 underevaluated. Necrosulfonamide and highly active antiretroviral drug therapy (HAART) can be effective in preventing pyroptosis and at reducing viral replication. Further, it was also found that increasing time delays can effectively decrease ℜ0 and, then, inhibit HIV-1 replication. Furthermore, it is shown that both CTLs and antibody immune responses have no effect on ℜ0, while this can result in less HIV-1 infection.