Left: Russell Steinke. Age: 56 / HIV: 23 years / Has suffered from: memory loss, nerve damage in feet, lipodystrophy, fatigue.
Right: Enrico McLane. Age: 52 / HIV: 17 years / Has suffered from: short-term memory loss, two hip replacements.
(Photo: Marco Grob)
A striking number of HIV patients are living longer but getting older faster—showing early signs of dementia and bone weakness usually seen in the elderly.
Some fifteen years into the era of protease inhibitors and drug cocktails, doctors are realizing that the miracles the drugs promised are not necessarily a lasting solution to the disease. Most news accounts today call HIV a chronic, manageable disease. But patients who contracted the virus just a few years back are showing signs of what’s being called premature or accelerated aging. Early senility turns out to be an increasingly common problem, though not nearly as extreme as James’s in every case. One large-scale multi-city study released its latest findings this summer that over half of the HIV-positive population is suffering some form of cognitive impairment. Doctors are also reporting a constellation of ailments in middle-aged patients that are more typically seen at geriatric practices, in patients 80 and older. They range from bone loss to organ failure to arthritis. Making matters worse, HIV patients are registering higher rates of insulin resistance and cholesterol imbalances, and they suffer elevated rates of melanoma and kidney cancers and seven times the rate of other non-HIV-related cancers.
Whether this is a result of the drugs or the disease itself, or some combination, is still an open question and certainly varies from patient to patient and condition to condition. Either way, it is now clear that even patients who respond well to medications by today’s standards are not out of the woods. Current life-expectancy charts show that people on HIV medications could live twenty fewer years on average than the general population. “It’s spooky,” says Mark Harrington, who heads Treatment Action Group, a New York–based HIV think tank. “It seems like the virus keeps finding new tricks to throw at us, and we’re just all left behind going, What’s going on?”
Read more: Why a Number of HIV Patients Are Aging Faster — New York Magazine http://nymag.com/health/features/61740/#ixzz0W4hSucND
Not sure if you have seen this but the CDC determined that the level of severeness for arthritis was higher for African Americans and Hispanics, in spite of lower frequency amongst these groups. The article was printed in the May issue of Preventing Chronic Disease.
We are only going to find additional problems with arthritis and our maturing population. With the aging of the baby boomer population, the prevalence of arthritis is estimated to rise substantially from 46 million Americans to 67 million Americans by 2030.
thanks for sharing! will read with great interests