Study: HIV linked to greater risk of heart attacks

by Scott Roberts PINK News.co.uk

A study in the US has found people living with HIV are nearly 50% more likely to have a heart attack.

Researchers aren’t sure what explains the higher heart attack rate for those who are HIV positive, but they speculate it’s a combination of the effects of HIV infection and the antiretroviral drugs used to treat it.

“It’s a complicated picture,” said Matthew Freiberg, who led the study at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania. “We’re still trying to understand the mechanisms.”

Joseph Sonnabend, Remembering the Original AZT Trial

An interesting article by early AIDS doctor Joseph Sonnabend, who can’t usually decide what side he’s on, but enough time has passed that he now thinks it is okay to be against AZT.
reposted from http://www.aras.ab.ca/

By Joseph Sonnabend - blogs.poz.com

From time to time I'll write about some of the earliest events in the epidemic.  I've had the opportunity to participate in some of them, both as a physician caring for people with AIDS from its first recognition in 1981 and also as a microbiologist.   Today, I'm going back 24 years to recall - with the help of a few contemporary documents, a significant event in the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  This was the introduction of AZT, the first drug to be approved for the treatment of HIV infection.

This is not so much about AZT as it is about the trial that led to its approval and how it made me aware that even if we then had no lifesaving treatments there was much we were able to do for our patients.

I'm certainly not writing a history of the introduction of AZT. This is just the personal account of a doctor treating HIV infected individuals at the time, who was unable to recommend AZT for his patients at least not at the huge dose then suggested by authorities who had taken on the medical leadership of the epidemic.

I'm not sure that it's even possible to adequately describe the terror and desperation felt in the early 1980s.   By 1986 nothing of any use regarding treatments had come from the Public Health Service and very little from the academic medical community.  For example, people with AIDS had to wait until 1989 for the CDC to issue guidelines for the prevention ofpneumocystis pneumonia, the most frequent cause of death among them, while this type of pneumonia had often been routinely prevented in many other individuals who were also at risk because they were recipients of kidney transplants, or were children with leukemia.  The way to prevent pneumocystis pneumonia was no secret - it had been published in 1977.  

Here are ten facts every person diagnosed as HIV-positive has a right to know

reposted from helpforhiv.com/

Being diagnosed HIV-Positive can be a traumatic experience – emotionally, mentally, and physically.

Following the initial shock, most people are faced with a lot of fears and questions about a number of life-changing issues.

We created this website to help you find your way through these fears by helping you better understand the medical facts about your diagnosis, and to provide information that can help guide you in making some important decisions.

Here are ten facts every person diagnosed as HIV-positive has a right to know (click on the words in green for quick references)…

FACT #1: There is strong evidence that the HIV test you took is very often wrong. We have found over fifty different scientific studies listing seventy non-HIV conditions that can make the test produce false positive results. Depending on which test you took, they have been proven to be wrong as much as 90% of the time. So you might not be HIV-positive at all.