Introduction:

despite antiretroviral treatment and its current wide coverage, HIV/AIDS continues as an increasing health problem, and with it, alterations in body composition.

Objective:

to assess the influence of individual factors, HIV and ART, on the longitudinal changes in body fat in people with HIV/AIDS.

Methods:

longitudinal-retrospective study that included the data of 159 HIV/AIDS people from Pinar del Río, Cuba, (72,3 % men) with at least three determinations of body mass index, tricipital skin-fold thickness, waist and hip circumference, over a period of 1,3 years. Longitudinal models with two levels were estimated using multilevel regression for repeated measurements.

Results:

only waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio showed significant longitudinal changes (p<0,001). Sex, time with antiretroviral treatment and the initial waist-to-hip ratio were the predictor variables that contributed significantly (p<0,1) to the increase of the waist-to-hip ratio in the regression models. Male sex contributed with an increase of 4,2 % to the waist-to-hip ratio. For each year with antiretroviral treatment the WHR increased by 0,6 % and the waist-to-hip ratio that the individuals had at the end of the study represented 78,1 % of the initial WHR plus a constant value of 20 %.

Conclusions:

the indicators of the central abdominal fat were the most useful to estimate the longitudinal changes of body fat index in HIV/AIDS individuals, the initial WHR was the best predictor of this indicator at the end of the follow-up period.

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