Living longer with HIV — but living well?

Thanks to modern antiretroviral therapy, life expectancy for people living with HIV is close to that of people without HIV, and those who reach good immune recovery early after starting treatment appear to have a life expectancy similar to people without HIV. But living longer is not the same as living well. Studies show that people living with HIV develop other conditions more often, and spend fewer of their years in good health, than the rest of the population. How much of that extra risk comes from HIV itself is still an open question.

COSMOHS — the Cohort Study on Morbidity and HIV in Sweden — was set up to answer it. By linking the Swedish nationwide HIV quality register InfCareHIV to Sweden's national health and population registers, we can follow health outcomes for people with and without HIV across more than 40 years, while accounting for age, sex, country of birth, socioeconomic situation and other comorbidities.