HIV Infected People Could Have Higher Risk Of Cancer
According to the researchers, people having HIV have much higher risk of cancer including anal cancer and low risk of prostate cancer.
May be because men with HIV infections are more likely to have lower testosterone levels, which could be protective against prostate cancer .
A study involving 54,780 men and women infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which cause AIDS was done from 1992 to 2003. According to the study done by Annals of Internal Medicine, Anal cancer by 2003 had become more common among HIV- infected people than the general population.
Other disease like Hodgkin’s disease was 18 times more common, liver cancer was seven times common, lung cancer 3.6 times common, skin cancer melanoma and throat cancer both are three times common and colorectal cancer 2.4 times more common.
This is because the virus damages the body’s immune system, raising susceptibility to illnesses and infections. Many patients having AIDS develops Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer previously associated with older people or people receiving immunosuppressant medications following an organ transplant at their early stage.
“The study was done because we all know that now people with HIV are living longer because of the advent of combination drug therapy in 1990s called highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART“. says Dr. Pragna Patel of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led the study. Moreover she says ” HIV is looking more like a chronic disease. So we wanted to look at one of the other very large chronic killers in America, cancer”.
She said, for anal sex multiple factors are involved. “Anal sex and how many times you have anal sex and how many sex partners you have — that all matters with regard to HPV infection,” Patel said.
Source: Reuters India
Filed under AIDS, Cancer, HIV, Health, Lung
