This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Higher fracture risk found for patients with HIV
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Fracture rates among patients with HIV are higher than those in the general U.S. population, according to results of a study recently published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
“We believe our data support the need to develop guidelines that address screening for and correcting reversible causes of low bone mineral density [BMD] and fall risk, and that these activities should be incorporated into the routine care of HIV-infected patients,” lead author Benjamin Young, MD, PhD, stated in an Infectious Diseases Society of America press release.
Previous studies had found patients with HIV were susceptible to lower BMD, raising questions about the possibility of an increased fracture risk.
Methods and findings
Young and his colleagues analyzed data from the HIV Outpatient Study (HOPS), an open prospective cohort study of adults with HIV who underwent follow-up at 10 U.S. HIV clinics from 2000 to 2008. The group investigated first fracture data for any anatomic site among 5,826 patients in the HOPS group and compared the findings to general population data from outpatients in the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.
The investigators found that 233 patients in the HOPS group were found to have incident fractures – with crude annual rates of 59.6 to 93.5 fractures per 10,000 persons.
Impact of age
Among individuals aged 25 years to 54 years, fracture rates and the relative proportion of fragility fractures were 1.98 to 3.69 times greater among patients in the HOPS group than patients in the general population cohort. Older age, substance abuse, hepatitis C infection and diabetes were all associated with incident fractures.
Notably, the study authors wrote, nadir CD4 cell count was also found to possibly have an impact on fracture rates.
“This study also highlights, for the first time, a potential association between fracture risk and CD4 cell count,” Young stated in the release. “The optimal clinical management of bone health in HIV-infected individuals is not well-defined and remains controversial.”
References:
- Young B, et al. Increased rates of bone fracture among HIV-infected persons in the HIV Outpatient Study (HOPS) compared with the U.S. general population, 2000 - 2006. Clinical Infectious Diseases. 2010;52(8):1061–1068. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciq242.
- www.idsociety.org
Disclosure: Young has received recent research grants from Cemer, Gilead Sciences, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline, and is a member of an advisory board or Speaker’s Bureau for GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Viiv Healthcare.
Follow ORTHOSuperSite.com
on Twitter