A new study finds that in the era of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), recently HIV-infected people in industrialized countries have prospects of survival similar to their uninfected peers.
Before 1996, HIV-positive patients living in 10 European nations, Australia, and Canada had mortality rates 41 times that of those who were uninfected, the study showed. By 1997, death rates among the infected fell to 31 times that for comparable ages, and the marked decline continued until reaching six times the norm by 2006.
While that is still a substantial risk, the comparison included long-term HIV patients who had switched from therapy to therapy to survive, those who contracted HIV through shared needles, and patients struggling with various health problems related to drug abuse.
People sexually infected since 1999 who received the latest treatments had about the same mortality rate as uninfected peers of the same age within the first five years after infection. However, in the first 10 years after seroconversion, the cumulative excess probability of death was 4.8 percent among patients ages 15-24. Excess risk of mortality was seen for HIV patients of all ages based on the amount of time since infection.
"We found that the gap in mortality rates between HIV-infected individuals in our study and the general population narrowed in every calendar period from 1996 onward," wrote Kholoud Porter of the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit in London and colleagues. By 2006, excess mortality attributable to AIDS had fallen 94 percent compared with pre-1996 levels, they wrote.
The full study, "Changes in the Risk of Death After Seroconversion Compared with Mortality in the General Population," was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (2008;300(1):51-59).
07/01/08
GLOBAL: Death Rates Fall for HIV Patients
Source: San Francisco Chronicle:: Sabin Russell; Courtesy of the CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention