The discovery of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) in the 1990s was a historical game-changer for those infected with HIV. Instead of dying with AIDS four years after diagnosis, patients infected could now live for decades going forward. While certainly a welcome happening, HAART opened up a new set of questions for those affected with HIV along with healthcare providers: How do we handle growing old with HIV? And how does medicine cope with an utter lack of evidence about how to handle challenges? This book, written for healthcare professionals and published in 2010, attempts to summarize the evidence through the contributions of American and British clinicians across eight disciplines.
This book is edited by a family physician, and issues prominent with primary care providers are featured centrally in it. Several disciplines on different organ systems are featured, including the immune, nervous, psychiatric, cardiovascular, endocrine, renal/kidney, and pulmonary systems. Finally, the book concludes with a long chapter on cancer and HIV. Due to the relatively young age of the field of caring for HIV infections, the summaries here provide light in an area without much data because of its historic youth. Chapter authors are experts in their field as related to HIV/AIDS, drawn from all over the United States and United Kingdom.
A close and careful examination of the evidence, as done here, sheds light on interesting nuggets and on where future efforts need to take place. Smoking is over-represented in the population directly affected by HIV. Depression is likewise over-represented when compared to the general public. Of course, HAART has dramatically affected outcomes, and non-AIDS-defining cancers (i.e., any cancer not Kaposi’s Sarcoma, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, etc.) have increased in incidence as the population of those affected by HIV has aged, even when compared to the rest of the population. HAART itself affects lipid metabolism, which increases the rate of cardiovascular diseases. Many more insights are provided…
The audience for this book does not consist of those infected with HIV, but instead consists of healthcare professionals. Most patients would probably find much of this book overly technical. Each chapter is meticulously cited by the academic literature. Again, an emphasis on primary care topics plays most prominently throughout the book, probably due to Lee’s editing. I’d be curious for an update for research developments in the 12-13 years since this book was written. We can be grateful that long-term survival of HIV infection is now the normal course; this book is a careful deep dive into what implications are now unearthed.
HIV and Aging
Edited by Sharon Dian Lee
Copyright (c) 2010
Informa Healthcare
ISBN13 9781420065978
Page Count: 137
Genre: Healthcare, HIV/AIDS
www.amazon.com