B.C. researchers explore life expectancy among HIV-positive people

published on March 30, 2017 by CATIE - HIV and Hep C Info Resource, in Positive Lite.com

From CATIE, Sean R. Hosein reports on studies comparing the effect of comorbidities on life expectancy in people living with HIV and those who are HIV-negative.

In the 20th century, life expectancy increased in Canada and other high-income countries thanks to improvements in medicine, better living conditions and so on. These changes have led some researchers to focus on something called health-adjusted life expectancy: exploring the number of years a person can expect to live in good and bad health and taking into account age-related illness, death and disability.

Among many HIV-positive people in Canada and other high-income countries there has been a very significant average increase in life expectancy since the introduction of potent combination anti-HIV therapy (ART) in 1996. However, some HIV-positive people, even if they use ART, will not have near-normal life expectancy because of problems largely unrelated to HIV infection, including the following:

smoking
substance use
unrecognized, untreated or poorly managed mental health issues
co-infection with hepatitis B virus (HBV) and/or hepatitis C virus (HCV)

Researchers at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS working in collaboration with other researchers in Canada and the U.S. recently conducted an analysis on health-related information collected from about 9,000 HIV-positive people and 510,000 HIV-negative people. They found that, overall, while HIV-positive people had increased life expectancy since 1996, it was substantially less than that of the average HIV-negative person of the same gender. Furthermore, HIV-positive women in B.C. had reduced life expectancy compared to HIV-positive men. The researchers explored the major reasons for this diminishment in life expectancy found in their study and made some recommendations.

Study details

The research team reviewed data collected between April 1, 1996 and December 31, 2012 from people aged 20 years and older who were known to be HIV positive. All participants had been prescribed ART. In total, data were analysed from 9,310 HIV-positive people and 510,313 HIV-negative people. All participants in this study were residents of British Columbia.

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B.C. researchers explore life expectancy among HIV-positive people

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