|
PARIS: Anti-HIV drugs have slashed death rates among people with the
AIDS virus by nearly 40 percent since combination therapy was
introduced in 1996, boosting their life expectancy by some 13 years,
a study says.
It is the biggest assessment into the
effectiveness of highly active antiretroviral therapy—the triple
cocktail of drugs that suppress, but do not eradicate, the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Publishing on Friday in the British weekly
medical journal The Lancet, researchers report on 14 ongoing studies
into more than 33,000 HIV-infected people living in Europe, Canada
and the United States.
These people started antiretrovirals in one of
three phases—from 1996 to 1999; from 2000 to 2002; and from 2003
to 2005.
From 1996 to 2005, 2,056 patients died, but
mortality fell by around 40 percent in the course of this period.
Life expectancy at the start was 36.1 years but rose to 49.4 years
at the end.
“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,” says the paper.
The team is headed by Robert Hogg, a professor
at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
The study found that people who were treated
earlier after infection and had a higher number of CD4 immune cells
at the start of the therapy had a better life expectancy.
Despite the greater overall survival chances,
there remained a big gap in life expectancy between people on
antiretrovirals and the general population, the authors found.
In a rich 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, according to this data.
The mortality figures culled in the study are
not detailed enough to explain this discrepancy, the authors admit.
Nor—given most people with HIV are under
50—are there yet any figures to compare survival among older
HIV-infected people compare with non-infected counterparts.
In high-income economies, a disproportionately
high number of injecting drug users have HIV, where there is a
higher risk of suicide or a fatal overdose.
Australian AIDS expert David Cooper at the
University of South Wales, near Sydney, said that the study was a
useful pointer to people with HIV as to how long they could expect
to live if they had access to the antiretroviral lifeline.
Since AIDS emerged in 1981, the disease has
claimed around 25 million lives and another 33 million are infected,
some two-thirds of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa.
-- AFP
|
