www.nature.com/scientificreports OPEN received: 09 May 2016 accepted: 10 January 2017 Published: 21 February 2017 Immunologic treatment failure among HIV-infected adult patients in Jiangsu province, China Tao Qiu1, Ping Ding1, Gengfeng Fu1, Xiping Huan1, Xiaoqin Xu1, Zhi Zhang1, Xiaoyan Liu1, Haitao Yang2, Jeff Mandel3, Chongyi Wei3, Willi McFarland3 & Hongjing Yan1 The National Free Antiretroviral Treatment Program was implemented in Jiangsu Province, China in 2005 We conducted a retrospective, open cohort study to determine treatment failure rates and associated risk factors Data were obtained from the national web-based antiretroviral treatment database WHO criteria were used to define immunologic treatment failure Kaplan-Meier methods were used to determine treatment failure rates and Cox proportional hazards modeling was used to identify risk factors A total of 5,083 (87.8%) having at least one CD4 cell count measure were included from 2005 to 2013 Overall, 30.4% had immunologic treatment failure with cumulative treatment failure rates increasing to 50.5% at month 60 and 64.1% at month 90 Factors predicting treatment failure included being treated in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention system (HR 1.69, 95% CI 1.14–2.50, p = 0.009) or jail hospital (HR 1.20, 95% CI 1.08–1.34, p = 0.001), and having a baseline CD4 count >350 cells/uL (HR 2.37, 95% CI 1.94–2.89 p