Health problems

Health problems features

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  A healthy – and happy – old age with HIV

  At least one–in-five people with HIV in the UK is now over 50.1 Gus Cairns asks: What’s the recipe for staying fit and happy as we age? ...

  From:  HIV treatment update

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  Efavirenz and the brain: are we nearer to solving a mysterious side-effect?

  One of the most potent HIV drugs, efavirenz, unfortunately also causes mysterious and sometimes chronic disruptions of mood, thought and sleep. Researchers may have found the key to...

  From:  HIV treatment update

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  HIV and TB in Practice for nurses: cotrimoxazole prophylaxis

  Cotrimoxazole prophylaxis is the use of a common antiobiotic to prevent a range of infections that commonly affect people living with HIV. ...

  From:  HIV & AIDS treatment in practice

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  HIV and TB in Practice for nurses: non-communicable diseases, HIV and TB

  Conditions such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes in low- and middle-income countries, and awareness of these conditions in people living with HIV and/or TB. ...

  From:  HIV & AIDS treatment in practice

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  ART and TB prevention

  This edition explores what is known about the potential benefits and limits of antiretroviral therapy (ART) for TB prevention and control....

  From:  HIV & AIDS treatment in practice

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  Growing pain

  As people with HIV live longer, they are facing pains old and new. David McLay reports on peripheral neuropathy and arthritis....

  From:  HIV treatment update

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  Breathtaking mortality: bacterial pneumonia and HIV

  Ever stopped to think about the top reason people with HIV end up in intensive care? Heart attack? Liver problems? Accidents? No, pneumonia. David McLay investigates an...

  From:  HIV treatment update

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  HIV and lymphoma

  Guest writer Matt Sharp updates HTU on a group of cancers that still cause premature deaths in people with HIV, though cure rates are improving....

  From:  HIV treatment update

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  Acute and chronic kidney disease

  Part of a series on kidney disease in resource-limited settings. This edition looks at the causes and prevalence of acute and chronic kidney disease in...

  From:  HIV & AIDS treatment in practice

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  Kidney disease in people with HIV: a clinical review (part one)

  First in a series on kidney disease in resource-limited settings. This edition covers the scale of the problem, diagnosing kidney disease and monitoring kidney function....

  From:  HIV & AIDS treatment in practice

Health problems in your own words

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  Diagnosed far from home

  I still remember the very cold January morning; I was not listening to the pre-counselling, I thought it did not concern me. I just...

  From:In your own words

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  Peripheral neuropathy – the sting in the tail

  To begin: It is estimated that between 30% and 40% of HIV patients will develop neuropathy. In the United States alone, there are 20 million sufferers (from...

  From:In your own words

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  Going into hospital

  My experiences of hospitalisation are mixed. I’ve been admitted twice in the last six months, both times for a minor operation. However, following the excellent...

  From:In your own words

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  Surving non-Hodgkin's lymphoma

  I was diagnosed with HIV in July 1997, aged 36 and was told I would not need HIV treatment for some years and that I...

  From:In your own words

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  Headaches

  In October 2000 I arrived in the UK from Zimbabwe. I went to live in Bristol with my then partner. Things went okay, and I...

  From:In your own words

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  TB - my experiences

  This might sound odd, but I was really shocked when I became seriously ill because of HIV. I was even more shocked when it turned...

  From:In your own words

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  Living with HIV and hep C co-infection and haemophilia

  For most people, coping with HIV is enough of a problem in itself, but when you throw in a lifetime disorder such as haemophilia, and...

  From:In your own words

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  The luxury of hypochondriacs

  That anxious look I get from loved ones is very hard to take, and all I want to do is reassure them that everything will...

  From:In your own words

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  The bus of doom

  I've recently read the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman (which, if you haven't already read, I highly recommend). In this theological novel disguised...

  From:In your own words

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  Seroconversion

  I was given my diagnosis over the telephone after spending four days in hospital with meningitis. I now realise it wasn’t meningitis, it was an...

  From:In your own words

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  HIV support in Manchester

  I was diagnosed HIV-positive in the 1990s. My husband had been ill for the previous 18 months, but not with anything they could put a...

  From:In your own words

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  Finding support

  I found out I had HIV in June 2005. My world just fell apart. I didn’t know that I needed an HIV test, but the...

  From:In your own words

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  Finally undetectable!

  After almost 15 years of HIV, and six years of viral load testing, I heard on Thursday, June 21st 2001 that my viral load had...

  From:In your own words

Health problems news from aidsmap

• HIV increases the risk of heart attack, even in people with a suppressed viral load

  Infection with HIV is associated with an increased risk of heart attack, investigators from the United States report in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine. Importantly, this finding was based upon comparison of HIV-positive and HIV-negative individuals ...

  19 March 2013 | Michael Carter

• Continuing cotrimoxazole in children on ART reduces the risk of hospitalisation

  Children on ART for more than two years who continued taking daily cotrimoxazole had significantly fewer hospitalisations for malaria as well as for non-malarial infections (notably pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis), compared to children who stopped this treatment, researchers from Uganda ...

  06 March 2013 | Carole Leach-Lemens

• Low nadir CD4 cell count associated with increased cataract risk in South Africans taking HIV therapy

  A low nadir (lowest ever) CD4 cell count is associated with increased lens density – a marker for cataract formation – in people with HIV, investigators report in the online edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune ...

  22 February 2013 | Michael Carter

• Classic characteristics of old age associated with poor physical function in middle-aged people living with HIV

  Impaired physical function in middle-aged people living with HIV is associated with low muscle mass, reduced bone mineral density and hormonal changes, according to research conducted in the United States and published in the online edition of the Journal ...

  20 February 2013 | Michael Carter

• Frailty increases the risk of fragility fractures in men living with HIV: data collected in routine HIV care can help predict risk

  Important physiologic markers of frailty are associated with fragility fractures in men living with HIV, according to research conducted in the United States and published in the online edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases. “Among HIV-infected men, physiologic frailty…is strongly ...

  18 February 2013 | Michael Carter

• Tenofovir, atazanavir/ritonavir and Kaletra associated with kidney problems in patients taking HIV therapy

  Data from a large study into the safety of anti-HIV drugs suggest that the antiretrovirals tenofovir (Viread, also in Truvada, Atripla and Eviplera), atazanavir (Reyataz) and lopinavir/ritonavir (Kaletra) each have an independent association with a decline in kidney function. ...

  15 February 2013 | Michael Carter

• Tenofovir impairs enzyme that stops cells ageing

  A team of Australian researchers has found that tenofovir and, to a lesser extent, other drugs from the nucleoside/nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI) class, impairs an enzyme that slows down or stops ageing processes in immune cells in the test ...

  31 January 2013 | Gus Cairns

• Co-infection with hepatitis B or C is a risk factor for reduced bone mineral density among women with HIV

  Co-infection with hepatitis B or C is associated with reduced bone mineral density (BMD) in women living with HIV, French investigators report in the online edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. The investigators compared bone mineral ...

  28 January 2013 | Michael Carter

• Management of hypertension reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease for HIV-positive people with high blood pressure

  New Swiss research has shown the benefits of treating hypertension in HIV-positive people. The investigators calculated that the reduction in blood pressure achieved by their patients would “significantly reduce cardiovascular endpoints”. Traditional, rather than HIV-associated, risk factors were associated with increases ...

  21 January 2013 | Michael Carter

• Neurocognitive impairment results in poorer adherence to HIV therapy

  Neurocognitive impairment and problems with memory are associated with poorer adherence to antiretroviral therapy, investigators from the United States report in the online edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. The study also showed that better adherence ...

  07 January 2013 | Michael Carter

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Health problems news selected from other sources

• Is London’s gay scene self-harming through sex and drug use?

  David Stuart of gay men's drug project Antidote discusses increases in the use of methamphetamine and mephedrone in London's gay scene and an increased tendency to inject them.

  24 January 2013 | Pink News

• Higher Dose Flu Vaccine Works Better for People with HIV

  HIV positive people who received a quadruple dose of a trivalent seasonal influenza vaccine produced more protective antibodies without a significant increase in side effects, researchers reported in the January 1, 2013, Annals of Internal Medicine.

  04 January 2013 | HIVandHepatitis.com

• FDA clears Salix anti-diarrhoeal for HIV patients

  The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the first anti-diarrhoeal drug specifically for people with HIV, Salix Pharmaceuticals Ltd.'s Fulyzaq. The drug, also known as crofelemer, is meant to relieve symptoms of noninfectious diarrhoea in people with HIV on antiretroviral therapy. Fulyzaq is derived from the red sap of the Croton lechleri plant and is the second botanical prescription drug approved by the FDA. However, although crofelemer produced a 55% reduction in watery diarrhoea in people with HIV on ART who chronically suffered from it, this only means that 17.6% of patients improved during the study period rather than 8% given a placebo.

  02 January 2013 | MarketWatch

• D:A:D model is good predictor of diabetes in HIV-positive people

  A model developed by the Data Collection on Adverse events of Anti-HIV Drugs (D:A:D) study group proved a good predictor of diabetes in HIV-positive people, better than the Framingham model in certain circumstances.

  09 November 2012 | International AIDS Society

• HPV vaccine may benefit HIV-infected women

  Women with HIV may benefit from a vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV), despite having already been exposed to HPV, a study finds. Although many may have been exposed to less serious forms of HPV, more than 45 percent of sexually active young women who have acquired HIV appear never to have been exposed to the most common high-risk forms of HPV.

  09 November 2012 | NIH press release

• Unravelling the complexity of HIV and fatigue

  It is uncertain how common HIV-related fatigue is in the modern era. A team of researchers at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK have been studying fatigue in people with HIV infection and in HIV-negative people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and comparing them to otherwise-healthy HIV-negative people.

  24 October 2012 | CATIE

• More HIV-Positive Patients Receive Organ Transplants

  Hospitals are increasingly willing to transplant vital and scarce organs into people who have HIV, a once-unthinkable step now made possible with drug regimens that are helping such patients live longer.

  12 October 2012 | Wall Street Journal

• NYC Warns of Cluster of Life-Threatening Meningitis in HIV+ Gay Men

  The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene investigating a cluster of potentially lethal invasive meningococcal disease among HIV-positive gay men.

  28 September 2012 | AIDSMeds

• Thalidomide for HIV-Related IRIS Shows Promise

  Thalidomide, a historically controversial drug, may hold potential for people living with HIV who experience immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS) and do not respond favorably and quickly to corticosteroids like prednisone, according to a small series of case reports published online ahead of print by the journal AIDS. 

  24 September 2012 | AIDSMeds

• Federal AIDS official: Older Americans trigger 'greying' of HIV

  A statistic that emerged on National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day: By 2015, more than half of Americans living with HIV – many of them gay men – will be over age 50.

  20 September 2012 | Examiner.com

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