AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, September 3, 2001
Michael Greer, Staff Medical Writer

NewsRx - Potent antiretroviral therapy has benefited some demographic groups of HIV patients more than others, researchers in Maryland report.

"The advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has reduced the incidence of most AIDS-related opportunistic illnesses (OI) and death in HIV infected individuals," according to Richard D. Moore and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

However, although women and injecting drug users have shared in the benefits of HAART, Moore and coworkers found that they have seen less pronounced reductions in risk compared with other patient demographic groups.

Female HIV patients have seen marked improvements in the amount of time they can expect to have before dying or developing an AIDS-defining illness since the introduction of HAART in 1995, study data showed. The median disease-free survival time increased by 14% for female patients with relatively good immune status and by 34% for patients with badly impaired immune systems. Male patients, however, saw 43% and 100% improvements respectively over the same period of time.

Similarly, patients who used injection drugs saw increased disease-free survival times of 16% and 34% in the HAART era, compared with improvements of 65% and 135% for nonusers, Moore and team reported. Women and injecting drug users had some 1.3 times higher AIDS progression risks than did men or abstainers after 1995, they said.

Race did not have a significant effect on progression risk in this study population, which was made up of more than 4,100 patients in an "urban HIV clinical practice" ("Differences in HIV disease progression by injection drug use and by sex in the era of highly active antiretroviral therapy," AIDS 2001 Jun 15;15(9):1115-1123.

"Disease-free survival time was extended with the use of HAART, but these gains were not equally distributed by sex and IDU [injection drug use] in our cohort," Moore and coauthors concluded.

The corresponding author for this report is Richard D. Moore, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 1830 East Monument St., Room 8059, Baltimore, MD 21205 USA.

A search at www.NewsRx.net using the search term "AIDS and HIV therapy" yielded 1,191 articles in six specialized reports.

Key points reported in this study include:

• Potent antiretroviral therapy has benefited some demographic groups of HIV patients more than others
  


• Women and injecting drug users have seen improvements in their progression-free survival times since the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART)
  


• However, these gains have been far outstripped by the benefits seen in men and abstaining patients
  

This article was prepared by AIDS Weekly editors from staff and other reports.

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