A $23 million grant will allow an investigation into early emergence of cardiovascular and lung disease, diabetes and cancer in HIV patients.
With the development of many different antiretroviral medicines effective for the control of HIV infection, patients with AIDS are living much longer. In fact, it typically is not the HIV infection that leads to their deaths, but chronic illnesses, such as cardiovascular and lung disease, cancer and diabetes, that develop much sooner in people with AIDS than in the overall population.
A new study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will build on research conducted beginning in the 1980s. Two older studies –– the 26-year-old Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS), a multi-center study of women who are either living with HIV or at risk for HIV infection, and the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) involving men (which began in 1984) will be merged into the MACS/WIHS Combined Cohort Study.
This new study will continue to use information from participants enrolled in the original two studies, but also accept an additional 2500 participants, including some without HIV. The focus, however, will not be on the HIV infection, but rather on the chronic conditions that have developed in many of the previous study participants and are now the leading causes of illness and death among people living with HIV.
The NIH is providing a $23 million grant to researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System to support the seven-year program.
