Death Rates for HIV Patients Decrease Dramatically

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
Wednesday, July 2, 2008; 3:00 AM

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TUESDAY, July 1 (HealthDay News) -- Death rates for HIV-infected people lucky enough to get their hands on antiretroviral medications have decreased dramatically since the introduction of these drugs in 1996, new British research shows.

For most, the five-year, post-diagnosis survival for those infected sexually is now about equal to that of the general population.

Death rates were higher, however, for older individuals, for those who had been infected for a longer time, and for those who had been infected through intravenous drug use.

Dramatic declines in death rates for HIV-infected individuals following the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in industrialized nations in the mid-90s have already been documented.

"HIV is now a complex chronic disease," said Dr. Michael Horberg, director of HIV/AIDS at Kaiser Permanente Health Plan in Santa Clara, Calif. "And, if aggressively treated with accepted medications, we should expect to see mortality similar to the general population in that same demographic."

"[This information] will help health policy makers or those who monitor the effectiveness of treatments to forecast the impact of AIDS on health-care needs," said Srikanth Kolluru, an assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences with the Texas A&M Health Science Center in Kingsville. "One important thing to know is that the composition of HAART regimen will keep changing for a particular patient during his/her course of therapy depending on the development of tolerance to the particular drug. Hence, newer drugs with different mechanisms of action are continuously needed to be added to HAART regimen to maintain the low mortality rate."

The authors of the current study, published in the July 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, updates existing information, deliberately focusing on people whose seroconversion rates were relatively well-established. Seroconversion refers to the time when antibodies to HIV appear in the blood, usually from one week to several months or more after actual infection.