HIV & Aging Archive

Increasingly providers of clinical care for people living with HIV are spending less time managing drug resistance and associated short term ART toxicities and more time managing age associated illnesses (

We can’t talk about HIV without talking about sex, and when it comes to talking about HIV and sex and older adults…often times, mum’s the word. If doctors leave it to older adults to ask about their sexual health, and older adults leave it to their doctors to raise the issue, we have an unmet need. Driving this silence is the fact that older adults are seen as being “too old for sex.” But what does that mean? Sex, sexuality, and sexual health are multi-faceted and much more than insertive sex. Before one can start a conversation about sex, we need to know what we are talking about and how to talk about it. Let’s start with a few definitions.

A major international randomized clinical trial has found that HIV-infected individuals have a considerably lower risk of developing AIDS or other serious illnesses if they start taking antiretroviral drugs sooner, when their CD4+ T-cell count—a key measure of immune system health—is higher, instead of waiting until the CD4+ cell count drops to lower levels. Together with data from previous studies showing that antiretroviral treatment reduced the risk of HIV transmission to uninfected sexual partners, these findings support offering treatment to everyone with HIV.

HIV-infected people have higher risk of many cancers compared to HIV-uninfected people, but it is unclear if the magnitude of this elevated risk is consistent across age groups. As the proportion of HIV-infected people over age 65 is increasing over time and the elderly population is known to have high cancer risk, it is important to understand the relationship between HIV and cancer in this age group.