BRITAIN: People with HIV in the developed world are no more likely to die in the first five years following infection than men and women in the general population, British researchers said yesterday.
The risk for people infected through sex creeps up after that, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that highlights the power of Aids drugs introduced in the mid-1990s.
The findings did not include men and women infected through injected drug use, and their death risk remained higher in the five years after infection, according to Kholoud Porter of Britain's Medical Research Council, who led the study.
"This is looking really good that life expectancies are becoming close to the uninfected population," said Ms Porter, an epidemiologist.
"It also underscores the importance that people are identified and treated early."
The advent of combination drug therapy in the 1990s, called highly active anti-retroviral therapy, or Haart, has greatly extended the lives of many HIV-infected people, particularly in developed countries.
There is no cure or vaccine for HIV. However, the Haart drugs, which interfere with HIV at several levels, can keep people healthy for years even if they never eradicate the virus. This means, however, that people must take the drugs for life.
The British team compared the death risk in the five years following infection of 13,000 men and women to uninfected people of the same age and gender who were living in the same country at the same time.
Before 1996, when the treatment was not widely available, the heightened death risk ranged from almost 8 per cent to 20 per cent depending on age, before falling each year to zero in the year 2000 for all age groups, Ms Porter said.
The risk rises again after five years, possibly because people become less likely to take the drugs regularly or because they are less able to tolerate the drugs, Ms Porter said.
"From a practical point of view, people with HIV infections want to know how long they can expect to live for," she said.
The youngest group - people aged 15 to 24 when infected - had a 5 per cent higher risk of dying at 10 years following infection and a 7 per cent greater risk at 15 years than average healthy people. - (Reuters)