Premature aging seen as issue for AIDS survivors

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Premature aging seen as issue for AIDS survivorsBy LISA LEFF, Associated Press – June 11 2011http://www.apnews.com/ap/db_45577/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=KbOvuv0H & src=cat & dbid=45577 & dbname=Top+News & detailindex=7SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Having survived the first and worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when he was losing three

friends to the disease in a day and undergoing every primitive, toxic treatment that then existed, Greene is grateful to be alive.But a quarter-century after his own diagnosis, the former Mr. Gay Colorado, now 56, wrestles with vision impairment, bone density loss and other debilitating health problems he once assumed he wouldn't grow old enough to see."I survived all the big things, but now there is a new host of things. Liver problems. Kidney disease. It's like you are a 50-year-old in an 80-year-old body," Greene, a San Francisco travel agent, said. "I'm just afraid that this is not, regardless of what my non-HIV positive friends say, the typical aging process."Even when AIDS still was almost always fatal, researchers predicted that people infected with HIV would be more prone to the cancers,

neurological disorders and heart conditions that typically afflict the elderly. Thirty years after the first diagnoses, doctors are seeing these and other unanticipated signs of premature or "accelerated" aging in some long-term survivors.Government-funded scientists are working to tease apart whether the memory loss, arthritis, renal failure and high blood pressure showing up in patients in their 40s and 50s are consequences of HIV, the drugs used to treat it or a cruel combination of both. With people over 50 expected to make up a majority of U.S. residents infected with the virus by 2015, there's some urgency to unraveling the "complex treatment challenges" HIV poses to older Americans, according to the National Institutes of Health. Regards, VergelPoWeRUSA.org