Living With HIV For People Over 50 Years

Living With HIV For People Over 50 Years.
One January broad daylight in 1991, business journalist Jane Fowler, then 55, opened a symbol from a health insurance company informing her that her request for coverage had been denied due to a "significant blood abnormality". This was the leading inkling - later confirmed in her doctor's office - that the Kansas City, Kan, first had contracted HIV from someone she had dated five years before, a male she'd been friends with her entire adult life. She had begun seeing him two years after the end of her 24-year marriage.

Fowler, now 75 and robust thanks to the advent of antiretroviral medications, recalls being devastated by her diagnosis. "I went deeply that day and literally took to my bed. I thought, 'What's successful to happen?'" she said. For the next four years Fowler, once an active and thriving writer and editor, lived in what she called "semi-isolation," staying mostly in her apartment. Then came the dawning perception that her isolation wasn't helping anyone, least of all herself.

Fowler slowly began reaching out to experts and other older Americans to acquire knowledge more about living with HIV in life's later decades. By 1995, she had helped co-found the National Association on HIV Over 50. And through her program, HIV Wisdom for Older Women, Fowler today speaks to audiences nationwide on the challenges of living with the virus. "I obvious to discourse out - to put an old, wrinkled, white, heterosexual pretence to this disease. But my import isn't age-specific: We all need to understand that we can be at risk".

That point may be more urgent than ever this Wednesday, World AIDS Day. During a recent White House forum on HIV and aging, at which Fowler spoke, experts presented unfamiliar data suggesting that as the HIV/AIDS rash enters its fourth decade those afflicted by it are aging, too.

One report, conducted by the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA), esteemed that 27 percent of Americans diagnosed with HIV are now age-old 50 or older and by 2015 that percentage could double. Why? According to Dr Michael Horberg, evil chair of the HIV Medicine Association, there's been a societal "perfect storm" that's led to more HIV infections amid people in middle age or older.

And "Certainly the happen of Viagra and similar drugs to treat erectile dysfunction, people are getting more sexually working because they are more able to do so". There's also the perception that HIV is now treatable with complex drug regimens even though these medicines often come with onerous string effects. For her part, Fowler said that more and more aging Americans think themselves recently divorced (as she did) or widowed and back in the dating game.

And all too often, doctors decay to appreciate that their patients over 50 might still have active sex lives, so the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases is often overlooked. "Often, they're tested for HIV too late. Many have already been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. In fact, that's often how the diagnosis comes". At that point, it's much tougher for AIDS drugs to do their procedure of suppressing HIV.

Aging with HIV presents other problems, as well. According to ACRIA's appraise of about 1000 HIV-positive men and women, 91 percent are battling other hardened medical conditions associated with age, including arthritis, neuropathies and high-priced blood pressure. Many are coping with these conditions on their own: 70 percent of older Americans with HIV unexploded alone, the promulgate found, more than twice the gait of their non-infected contemporaries.

Adding HIV and its often potent drug therapy to the usual troubles of aging can be tough. Speaking at the White House conference, Dr Amy Justice, chief executive officer investigator of the Veterans Aging Cohort Study, which involves more than 40000 veterans with HIV, said: "There are a lot of infected masses who are 60 or 65 or even 80 or 85. These the crowd feel older than their stated age and may have some of the same problems people 10 or 15 years older would normally experience".

According to Horberg, many of the diseases of aging "are made worse by HIV or its treatment". For case the AIDS stupefy tenofovir can impair kidney function, other antiretrovirals cannot be enchanted with cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Zocor or Mevacor, and it's suspected that HIV infection might even accelerate the start of Alzheimer's disease. Issues of HIV prevention and treatment can be especially tough on older women, said Diane Zablotsky, an confidant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina who's worked on the issue.

In terms of prevention, she notorious that it may be tougher for a woman past menopause to negotiate condom use with a partner, when pregnancy is no longer an issue. And in terms of diagnosis and treatment, "if you have a lassie experiencing edge of night sweats and other kinds of symptoms - is that menopausal change? A medication issue? Or is it an HIV-infection issue?" All of the experts stressed that the explanation to curbing HIV infection in older Americans is the same as it is for the young: prevention.

But that will design having much franker discussions about sex. "There's this history that older people aren't sexually active. Health-care providers could facilitate by taking sexual histories, but they don't because they assume they don't have to. They can ask about smoking and juice use, but sex? Oh no, the person is old" found here. zablotsky agreed. "The critical thing is to reach out to older people in a way which - if in fact they are engaging in behavior that puts them at imperil - they have a reason to say, 'I need to listen to this, I for to make this change, I need to protect myself'".