JUST A LIFESTYLE CHOICE?:

With HIV, growing older faster: Many gained years of life through drug 'cocktails,' but the ailments of aging are showing up earlier. (Mary Engel, 2/05/08, Los Angeles Times)

Much attention has been paid in recent years to how the human immunodeficiency virus disproportionately infects African Americans and Latinos, including women, many of them poor. But the new reality of HIV is not just black or brown. It is also gray.

The graying of HIV/AIDS is a little-recognized new phase of the epidemic in the United States, and it comes with its own complications. Gibson and Golay are growing old together, true. They are also growing older faster. Ailments common to aging, including depression, are showing up sooner than expected in many people with HIV, according to patients and the doctors who treat them.

"We're seeing things that my mother is experiencing," Golay said, "and she's 86."

Golay had a heart attack last year at 59, despite a lifetime of healthful eating and regular exercise. He underwent a quintuple bypass. ("He never does anything small," Gibson said.) His father had died of a heart attack -- at 70.

Gibson has the sunken eyes and cheeks of an old man, side effects of the antiretroviral drugs that keep his HIV in check. Lipodystrophy, as the condition is called, rearranges fat in the body and at one point gave Golay a humped back. It can lead to insulin resistance and raise cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the blood.

Some longtime survivors develop a bone disease possibly linked to the use of corticosteroids against pneumocystis pneumonia, one of the most lethal of the opportunistic infections that prey on HIV-weakened immune systems. Called avascular necrosis, the bone disease can lead to the need for a hip replacement. Others aging with HIV are developing memory deficits and liver and kidney diseases.

"I have a population that, having survived this terrible illness, is now getting illnesses of old age 10 or 20 years sooner than normal," said Dr. Ardis Moe, a physician at UCLA's Center for Clinical AIDS Research and Education.

Pretending that it is a disease of blacks, browns or grays has consequences Sharp rise in HIV infections (The Local, 5 Feb 08)

The number of new HIV infections jumped 20 percent in Sweden last year, health officials said Tuesday, quoting preliminary figures that could signal altered attitudes towards the disease that causes AIDS. [...]

"We have especially seen an increase in the number of new infections among men who have sex with men and needle-users," SMI statistician Malin Arneborn told AFP, adding that Sweden was thus following a trend already seen in other European countries.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 5, 2008 12:56 PM