CROI 2014: Aging
An expert panel discussing the importance of the role that HIV plays with depression, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and cancer risk factors that affect individuals living and aging with HIV. Presented at CROI this year was data demonstrating that inflammation created by HIV impacts physical and mental health as a trigger for depression, and that targeting inflammation with alternatives to pharmaceutical therapy alone such as exercise and nutrition in a combination of therapies to help individuals living with HIV create customized lifestyle choices that will drive inflammation reduction, depression management, and energy creation. The panel acknowledges that as individuals are aging with HIV, even those who have switched to single dose ARV therapies, people are having to return to a lifestyle of taking complex regimens of multiple pills to account for additional complications that go along with aging.
Also in discussion is how virus in the brain was found to be of a different genotype than virus in the periphery. This is not well understood as yet, while the group hypothesizes a possible relation to lack of strict adherence such as the ‘dental floss affect’, taking doses just before it is time to go back to the doctor and resulting in incompletely and sporadically repressing the virus.
Kristine Erlandson, Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado, Denver;
Todd Brown, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology Division of Endrocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD;
Peter Hunt, Associate Professor of Medicine, UCSF, San Francisco, CA;
Amy Justice, MD, M.Sc, PhD, Professor of Medicine, and of Public Health, and Section Chief of General Internal Medicine, VA, New Haven, CT;
Jeff Taylor, ATAC, Palm Springs, CA