Study finds people with HIV living longer

By Michael Kahn

LONDON (Reuters) - People with HIV in the developed world are no more likely to die in the first five years following infection than men and women in the general population, British researchers said on Tuesday.

The risk for people infected through sex creeps up after that, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that highlights the power of AIDS drugs introduced in the mid-1990s.

The findings did not include men and women infected through injected drug use, and their death risk remained higher in the five years after infection, said Kholoud Porter of Britain's Medical Research Council, who led the study.

"This is looking really good that life expectancies are becoming close to the uninfected population," said Porter, an epidemiologist. "It also underscores the importance that people are identified and treated early."

The advent of combination drug therapy in the 1990s called highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART, has greatly extended the lives of many HIV-infected people, particularly in developed countries.

There is no cure or vaccine but the drugs, which interfere with HIV at several levels, can keep people healthy for years even if they never eradicate the virus. This means people must take them for life.

Leading manufacturers of AIDS drugs include GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead Sciences Inc, Roche, Pfizer, Merck Inc, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Abbott Laboratories.

The British team compared the death risk in the five years following infection of 13,000 men and women to uninfected people of the same age and gender who were living in the same country at the same time.