Consistent with all these findings, it has been confirmed that viral load is only an indirect contributor to the rate of progression to AIDS, that immune activation predicts changes in CD4+ T cells, which are stronger and independent of viral load, and that the effect of anti-retroviral therapy in increasing CD4+ T-cell counts better correlates with the decrease in immune activation than the suppression of viral load [38, 75, 77, 78]. The gene discussed is CD4; the disease is AIDS.