HIV Digest	HIV Digest Archive

View our poll archive

Highly active anti-retroviral treatment (HAART) has profoundly altered the course of HIV infection, transforming it from a terminal illness into a chronic illness. To drive this point home, new research from Johns Hopkins University reveals that among HIV-infected individuals on HAART who have a CD4 cell count above 200, the risk of dying from a non-AIDS-related cause now exceeds the risk of dying from an AIDS-related cause. AIDS-related mortality dropped from a high of 40.9 deaths per 1,000 person-years in 1998 to a low of 20.2 deaths per 1,000 person-years in 2003, the research states. However, offsetting this decline is the finding that non-AIDS-related mortality increased from 10.7 deaths per 1,000 person-years in 1997 to a high of 22.7 deaths per 1,000 person-years in 2003.

Based on these findings, the investigators noted that "further efforts to reduce mortality in [the HIV-infected] population require attention to conditions that have not traditionally been considered to be HIV related."

from TheBodyPro.com