Since the introduction of anti-retroviral drugs such as Bristol-Myers Squibb Co's. Sustiva in 1996, the five-year, post-diagnosis survival for those infected sexually is now about equal to that of the general population.
As the duration of infection lengthens, the risk of death rises particularly among people infected for more than 10 years with HIV. However, with the use of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) by 2006, there has been a sudden decline in the first-five-year mortality to virtually the same level of the uninfected population.
The new study, led by Kholoud Porter and Krishnan Bhaskaran of the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit of London, was carried out on 16,534 patients in wealthier countries 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, the study found. 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 authors wrote in the July 2 edition of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.
