New research published in this week’s special HIV/AIDS issue of The Lancet reveals that the life expectancy of HIV patients taking antiviral drugs has increased more than 13 years since 1996, while deaths have dropped by almost 40 percent.

For example, people who started taking the drugs at age 20 could, on average, live another 43 years, lead researcher Robert Hogg, from the British Colombia for Excellence in HIV/AIDS in Vancouver and his colleagues discovered.
 
For the study, the researchers analyzed data on 43,355 HIV patients from North America and Europe who participated in 14 different studies.

“Between 1996-99 and 2003-05, there was a gain in life expectancy for those at age 20 years of about 13 years; similar gains in life expectancy in those aged 35 were also seen,” the researchers wrote.

Since 1996, when the combination antiretroviral drug therapy was first introduced as treatment for lowering the level of HIV circulating in the body, the average life expectancy has increased from 36.1 years in the following three years to 49.4 years in 2003-2005. there is no cure for this disease, but the antiretroviral therapy helps patients lead a near-normal life.

“These advances have transformed HIV from being a fatal disease, which was the reality for patients before the advent of combination treatment, into a long-term chronic condition,” Dr. Hogg said in the study.
 
The study followed three groups of HIV-positive people who began antiretroviral drug therapy in 1996-1999 (13,914 patients), 200-2002 (13,914 patients), and 2003-2005 (10,854).

Overall, 4.7 percent (2,056 patients) of the participants died during the course of the study. The mortality rate decreased from 16.3 deaths per 1,000 person-years in 1996-1999 to 10 deaths per 1,000 person-years in 2003-2005, meaning a drop of about 40 percent.

The study also found that those treated soon after getting infected had higher life expectancy than those treated later in the course of their infection. Those who became HIV-positive as a consequence of injected drug use had a shorter life expectancy (32.6 years) than those who became infected in other ways (44.7 years). Also women appeared to have a longer life expectancy than men (44.2 versus 42.8 years) most probably because women started HIV treatment earlier in the course of HIV infection than men.

However effective the antiviral treatment seems to be, there is still a big gap in life expectancy between people following the treatment and the general population, the researchers found. According to them, in a developed country, an HIV-positive person starting the drugs at the age of 20 will on average live another 43 years, to the age of 63, while a non-infected person will survive to around 80.

Since 1981, when AIDS was first spotted, the disease has claimed around 25 million lives. There are 33 million infected people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization statistics, two-thirds of whom living in sub-Saharan Africa.

A study published last week in the journal Cell Host & Microbe revealed that blacks present a gene variant, which while ensuring a higher level of protection against some types of malaria, increases the vulnerability to HIV infection, thus explaining the high frequency of HIV cases among black people. However, having this gene variant ensured an average of two years longer with the disease once get it, the same study showed.

Dr. Hogg’s study was funded by GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead Sciences, Roche, Pfizer, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Abbott Laboratories.