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First the good news: People with HIV
may enjoy life spans close to normal if they are on antiretroviral therapy,
maintain low viral loads and CD4 counts above 350, are not coinfected with
viral hepatitis, and are not injection drug users, according to a new study
from the United Kingdom, aidsmap reports.
Furthermore, those who survive past
60 may have life expectancies that surpass normal, thanks to the better overall
health care monitoring they experience compared with the general population.
Now the not-so-good news: An Australian study questions how solid such
projections may be in the face of successive therapies failing over time, even
in resource-rich countries. Both studies were presented at the 11th annual
International Congress on Drug Therapy in HIV Infection in Glasgow.
The projections on life expectancy
derive from the U.K. Collaborative HIV Cohort (UK CHIC) study, which is a
database of 43,000 patient records collected from 20 of the United Kingdom’s
largest HIV clinics. UK CHIC’s Margaret May, PhD, examined mortality data
concerning people who began taking antiretrovirals (ARVs) after age 20 between
2000 and 2008, and she tracked them until 2010. As data points, the study took
each patient’s CD4 count and viral load just before starting therapy and
compared them with the last CD4 and viral load figures for each subsequent
year. Final results were expressed as the number of subsequent years a patient
could expect to live past his or her 35th birthday. The study excluded
injection drug users.
In general, maintaining a higher CD4
count promised significant extra years of life. Five years into ARV treatment,
35-year-old male patients with counts between 350 and 500 could expect to live
to 77—and to 81 if their CD4 counts were higher than 500. On the flip side,
those who fail to develop a suppressed viral load would lose 11 years of life
expectancy. And people whose CD4 counts remain below 200 after five years on
ARVs could expect to live only to 55 on average.
Meanwhile, scientists at the
University of New South Wales in Australia projected that, if current trends of
treatment failure continue, people on ARVs may run out of effective therapies
after an average of 43 years, with 10 percent of people running through the
available options after about 23 years.
The Friends of AIDS Foundation is
dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and
empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV
virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.
TOGETHER WE REMAIN STRONG!
