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WASHINGTON: Anti-retroviral drug therapy has slashed
AIDS death rates in the first five years after infection to equal
the normal death rates in developed countries, scientists said
Tuesday.
In a report published in the July
2 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association,
researchers said the use of multiple anti-retroviral drug
“cocktails” to fight HIV/AIDS infections—called highly active
anti-retroviral therapy (HAART)—by 2006 had lowered
first-five-year mortality to virtually the same level of the
uninfected population.
After five years, the death rates
still diverge with AIDS/HIV-infected patients succumbing at an
accelerating rate, the researchers said—especially among older
patients.
But HAART regimes have proven to
have a strong impact in helping people survive the infection.
“Our results show the progress
in reducing mortality among HIV-infected individuals toward the
levels experienced by the general uninfected population,” the
researchers, led by Kholoud Porter and Krishnan Bhaskaran of the
Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit of London, said in a
summary of the research.
Their research was based on
monitoring 16,534 HIV-infected individuals between 1981 and 2006.
Overall during the period, 2,571
patients died, more than 10 times the likely 235 deaths that would
have been expected from a similar uninfected population.
But that excess mortality rate
reflected a very high rate of deaths in the early years of the study
before HAART regimes were widely available, the study said.
“Considering the first years
following the widespread introduction of HAART, we have estimated an
88-percent reduction in excess mortality in 2000 to 2001 compared
with pre-1996,” it said.
“Our more recent data show that
reductions have continued to 2004 to 2006.”
--AFP
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