HIV Infection Seems to Raise Heart Attack Risk

Doctors suspect that inflammation may be to blame

By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporter

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TUESDAY, April 24 (HealthDay News) -- People infected with HIV face nearly twice the risk of heart attack that non-infected individuals do, a new study suggests.

That risk remained elevated even after researchers accounted for age, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other cardiovascular risk factors, suggesting that the virus itself or therapies used to treat it might somehow be harming the heart.

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"We don't mean to scare people off their meds -- they need to take the meds to survive. But doctors should also be aware of this increased risk," said senior researcher Dr. Steven Grinspoon, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

His team reported the findings Tuesday in the online edition of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

The link between HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and heart disease isn't new, noted Rowena Johnston, vice president of research at the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), based in New York City.

"We have certainly suspected that for a long time," she said. In fact, one major European study, the Data Collection on Adverse Events of Anti-HIV Drugs (DAD), reported back in 2005 that HIV-positive patients had nearly twice the risk of heart attack compared to uninfected individuals of similar age.

But the new study involved even more powerful statistics. In its work, Grinspoon's team analyzed demographic and diagnostic data for more than 1.7 million patients treated at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital, both in Boston, since 1993.

They compared eight years of outcomes data for almost 4,000 HIV-infected patients, aged 18 to 84, with information on more than 1 million uninfected patients.

Overall, HIV-positive patients had nearly twice the risk of suffering a heart attack compared to age-matched controls, the researchers found. Those risks were especially high for women, whose odds of heart attack nearly tripled once they became infected, even after the researchers adjusted for age and heart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol and diabetes.

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