AIDS drugs have saved 3 million years of life in the US
From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:
Rochelle Walensky, M.D., M.P.H., Kenneth Freedberg, M.D., M.Sc., and their colleagues calculated that advances in HIV care have yielded a total survival benefit of 2.8 million years in the United States.
The researchers also estimate that drugs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV have averted 2,900 infant infections, saving an additional 137,000 years of life.
The paper by Drs. Walensky and Freedberg, of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School Center for AIDS Research, and their coauthors has been posted online by The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
"Since the early 1980s, soon after the first reports of what we now know as AIDS, NIH has devoted $30 billion to HIV/AIDS research," says NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. "This study clearly shows the dramatic impact that sustained investment in biomedical research can have in improving the lives of Americans."
Our goal in this study was to quantify the clinical progress in AIDS care in terms of years of life saved," says Dr. Walensky.
The investigators defined six eras of AIDS treatment between 1989 and 2003.
In the first two periods, 1989 to 1992 and 1993 to 1995, drugs became available to prevent two common infections--Pneumocyctis jirovecii pneumonia and Mycobacterium avium complex.
Although the drugs provided an average per-person survival benefit during that time of only 2.6 months, those early eras helped to shape the perception that AIDS was a treatable condition, notes Dr. Freedberg.
Drs. Walensky and Freedberg subdivided the HAART era, which began in 1996, into four periods corresponding to increasingly effective HAART and other advances in HIV care.
The model calculated a per-person survival benefit and a total survival benefit in each era.
NIAID supports basic and applied research to prevent, diagnose and treat infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria and illness from potential agents of bioterrorism.
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