HIV no longer fatal disease - study - News in brief

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Improvements in a medication used to treat HIV, known as combination anti-retroviral therapy (Cart), have seen life expectancy increase by some 13 years between 1996/99 and 2003/05. These advances have "transformed HIV from being a fatal disease into a long-term chronic condition", the study said.

But the study, published by the University of Bristol, said life expectancy in HIV patients remains well short of the general population, and patients treated late in the course of their infection have worse life expectancy.

For the research, published in journal The Lancet, a team of HIV experts compared changes in mortality and life expectancy among HIV-positive individuals treated with Cart.

Professor Jonathan Sterne, of Bristol University's Department of Social Medicine, worked with other study groups across the world to analyse 18,587, 13,914 and 10,584 patients who started Cart treatment in 1996/99, 2000/02, and 2003/05 respectively.

A total of 2,056 patients died during the study period, with death rates dropping from 16.3 deaths per 1,000 in 1996-99 to 10.0 per 1,000 in 2003/05. Life expectancy increased from 36.1 years in 1996/99 to 49.4 years in 2003/05, an increase of more than 13 years, the study revealed.

The study said that "despite" these positive results, an HIV-positive person starting Cart treatment at the age of 20 will on average live another 43 years, to 63. A 20-year-old HIV-negative person in a high-income country can expect to live to around 80, a difference of nearly 20 years.

The journal said the improvements in life expectancy and mortality were linked to the improvements during the first decade of Cart treatment.

The study also revealed that patients who contracted HIV through infected needles used to inject drugs had a shorter life expectancy - 32.6 years - than the average of those from other groups - 44.7 years.

Women also had a slightly longer life expectancy than men - 44.2 years for women to 42.8 years for men - which may be due to women on average starting their treatment earlier in the course of HIV infection.