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.