On March 17, The Lancet HIV and The Lancet Healthy Longevity jointly released the ageing with HIV album. Geriatric medicine is explored behind the high burden of multiple complications in elderly people living with HIV; the article notes that the number of elderly people living with HIV(often defined as 50 years of age or older) is increasing.
Screenshot from the Lancet magazine article
The efficacy of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and the success of treatment options worldwide mean that HIV is no longer a life-threatening infectious disease as long as individuals have access to care. However, this also has unintended consequences: the number of elderly people living with HIV (usually defined as 50 years or older) is increasing.
The number of people aged 50 years and over is increasing as young people living with HIV survive longer and age, and more and more older people are contracting AIDS. As a result, prevalence and incidence are increasing faster than in the overall population aged 50 years and older, for example, in the United States, between 2015 and 2019, the overall prevalence of people living with HIV increased by 8% and the incidence decreased by 4%, while in people aged 50 years and older, the prevalence increased by 40% and the incidence increased by 15%. UNAIDS estimates that the number of people living with HIV aged 50 or over increased globally from 5.4 million in 2015 to 8.1 million in 2020.
Society's awareness of AIDS needs to be further enhanced, because society believes that the elderly have infrequent sex and do not use drugs, and many people believe that the risk of new HIV infection in the elderly is small. As a result, there is a lack of attention to access to protective health information and early HIV detection in older persons. Nearly half of elderly AIDS patients are diagnosed later in the course of the disease. The article points out that in fact, older people are more likely than young people to have multiple complications. However, complications are more severe in older adults infected with AIDS than people of similar age who are not infected with AIDS.
In addition to more complications, older adults living with HIV face discrimination-related problems. The study found that inadequate and inconsistent use of research data in some regions, particularly in Latin America, may hinder the provision of care services and appropriate policies and research. (Compiled by Kong Tianjiao)
