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Patients with HIV at higher risk for developing AMD
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Patients infected with HIV have a four-fold increased risk for developing intermediate stage age-related macular degeneration compared with same-aged people who are not infected, according to results of the Longitudinal Study of the Ocular Complications of AIDS.
“With HIV and AIDS patients living longer than ever before, they are at an increased risk of developing several age-related diseases at an earlier age than HIV uninfected people including cardiovascular and diabetes,” Douglas A. Jabs, MD, MBA, said in a public release from the Mount Sinai Hospital/Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, which released the study results at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology annual meeting in Denver.
“Their increased risk for age-related diseases in general led us to analyze how these patients are impacted by one of the most common age-related diseases, macular degeneration,” he said in the release.
The cross-sectional Longitudinal Study of the Ocular Complications of AIDS (LSOCA), published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology, enrolled 1,825 patients who were infected with AIDS, had no ocular opportunistic infections and were between the ages of 13 and 73. Investigators graded retinal photographs of infected patients and compared them with graded photographs of uninfected HIV patients in the Beaver Dam Offspring Study, who were matched by age with patients in LSOCA.
Of the 1,825 patients, 9.9% had intermediate AMD. Prevalence of AMD ranged from 4% in patients between the ages of 30 and 39 years to 24.3% for patients aged 60 years and older. Compared with uninfected HIV patients in the Beaver Dam Offspring Study, patients in LSOCA, when adjusted for age, had a four-fold increase in prevalence of intermediate stage AMD, the study said.
“Reasons for this increased prevalence are not fully explained, but it may relate to the state of chronic immune activation and systemic inflammation seen in these patients, which would be consistent with the association of AMD with systemic inflammation seen in the HIV-uninfected population,” Jabs and colleagues said in the study. - by Nhu Te
Disclosure: Jabs reports he is on the Data and Safety Monitoring Committee at Applied Genetic Technologies Corporation and Novartis and is a consultant for Santen.
Reference:
Jabs D, et al. Am J Ophthalmol. 2015;doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajo.2015.01.037