HIV in Older Patients

The age of the HIV-infected population is becoming older, which is both good news and bad.

On one hand, it reflects the success of antiretroviral therapy, as people with HIV now have lifespan similar to that of people without HIV. The bad news, however, is that more older people are becoming infected with HIV.

Kashuba says that due in part to drugs such as Viagra and Cialis, people are becoming more sexually active later in life, and that leads to higher risks of infection and new pharmacology questions.

To answer those questions, Kashuba is collaborating on a study with Kristine Patterson, an assistant professor in the School of Medicine, to study the pharmacology of HIV therapy in the older population, an area that has not been heavily researched before.

“People are sexually active later in life, and there is a recent survey that just came out that showed that older people are less likely to protect themselves from transmitted diseases and less likely to get tested for HIV because they don’t think they are at risk,” Kashuba says. “So we’re seeing more older people being diagnosed with HIV for the first time. What we don’t know is how these drugs are handled in an older population. We don’t know what the toxicities are in an older population. We don’t know whether the transmission rates are increased in older populations. So there’re a bunch of kinetic-dynamic issues that need to be addressed.”

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