J. Math. Anal. Appl. 434 (2016) 837–857
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Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications
www.elsevier.com/locate/jmaa
Bifurcations of a mathematical model for HIV dynamics
✩
Jianfeng Luo, Wendi Wang
∗
, Hongyan Chen, Rui F u
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 3 November 2014
Available online 28 September 2015
Submitted by Y. Du
Keywords:
Backward bifurcation
Bistable infections
Stability
Immune response
HIV
This paper investigates bifurcations and stability of an HIV model that incorporates
the immune responses. The conditions for the global stability of infection-free
equilibrium and infection equilibrium are respectively established by the Lyapunov
method and the geometric approach. The backward bifurcation from the infection-
free
equilibrium is examined by analytical analysis. More interestingly, with the
aid of mathematical analysis, we find a new type of bifurcations from an infection
equilibrium, where a backward bifurcation curve emerges and can be continued to
the place where the basic reproduction number is less than unity. By numerical
simulations, we find a variety of dynamical behaviors of the model, which reveal the
importance and complexity of immune responses in fighting HIV replication.
© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Since the emergence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the early 1980s, the disease of HIV
infection has been pandemic around the world and has caused 34 million infected and 25 million deaths so
far [36]. Due to its wide range of infectiousness, strong mortality and incurability, HIV has become a major
problem for human health. Biological studies indicate that HIV infects CD4
+
T helper cells. The phase of
primary infection is characterized by a strong viral replication, which is rapidly followed by a strong immune
response [3,15]. In the second phase of HIV infection, infected individual displays no symptoms, but has
persistent viral replications, which eventually results in the development of AIDS [15].
Mathematical
models have been employed to study the dynamics of HIV infection in vivo [4,7,8,18,29,
39,44,37,50].
The basic model of three state variables was proposed by [27,30]:
✩
The research is supported by the NSF of China (11171276).
* Corresponding author.
E-mail
address: wendi@swu.edu.cn (W. Wang).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmaa.2015.09.048
0022-247X/© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.