A study has revealed that HIV patients who started with antiretroviral therapy during 2010 are expected to live 10 years longer than those who first started taking it during 1996. Researchers said that the Life expectancy in the “general population”, is 79 years for men and 85 for women in France, and 78 for men and 82 for women in the United States.
Researchers from the University of Bristol, said that the increase in the life span is attributed to the newer drugs which carry fewer side effects and are better in preventing the virus from replicating in the body.
The researchers analyzed 88,500 people across North America and Europe carrying out as many as 18 studies on them. The life-expectancy predictions on death rates were based on the first three years of follow up after drug treatment was started.
Study stated that the expected age at death of a 20 year old patient starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) after 2008, with a low viral load and post 1st year of treatment was 78 years, at par with that of general population.
How antiretroviral therapy boosts HIV patients’ life
The study states that,
• People who started taking antiretroviral treatment (ART) in 2008 or thereafter lived longer, healthier lives than those who started treatment in earlier years.
• ART, a cocktail of three or more drugs, blocks the virus from replicating, first became widely used in 1996.
• Recent drugs are even more efficient and contain even fewer side effects
• With the perception that HIV-positive people will live into old age, clinicians are screening for and treating comorbidities (diseases on top of HIV) more aggressively, which includes heart disease, hepatitis C and cancer.
What Doctors are saying
“Dr. Michael Brady, medical director at the Terrence Higgins trust said that the study showed how much things have changed since the start of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. However, today one in three of all those living with HIV are aged over 50”.
Prof Helen Stokes Lampard, who chairs the Royal College of GPs, said, It’s a tremendous medical achievement that an infection that once had such a terrible prognosis is now so manageable, and that patients with HIV are living significantly longer.
The World Health Organization recommends that ART be started in all people as soon as possible after diagnosis. Many people in poorer nations are still diagnosed too late, if at all, and treatment is not always readily available or affordable.
If you know somebody with HIV, do pass on the above message. Let us know your views in the comments.
Date:May 11, 2017