HIV-positive people risk heart disease - study

Aggressive antiretroviral therapies, often credited for prolonging the lives of HIV-positive people, may also speed up clogging of their arteries and put them at risk of heart disease, a new study suggests. The results have shown that hardening of the arteries, or arteriosclerosis, was more common and progressed more quickly in people being treated for HIV. Dr Priscilla Hsue, the assistant professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, studied 148 HIV patients who were on average 45 years old, had been infected for 11 years, and undergoing treatment with drug cocktails for more than 3 years. Hsue was quoted by Reuters as saying: "Our finding suggests that it would be reasonable to consider HIV infection a cardiac risk factor. Other risk factors, such as high cholesterol and high blood pressure, need to be aggressively treated in HIV patients - even if it means changes in their HIV medications to control cholesterol levels."