HIV Positive Now Overweight Like Everyone Else - As Disease Becomes A Chronic Condition, Other Health Issues Arise
Losing weight excessively was considered to be the last sign of having been contaminated with the HIV/AIDS virus, however, studies have found out that now people carrying the virus are becoming overweight and there are cases of obese people as well just like any other person in America according to a study based upon n extensive research which shall be presented in the 45th Annual Meeting of Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA).
According to IDSA, excess weight loss known as wasting was once a telltale sign of HIV/AIDS. However, in a study of more than 600 HIV-positive people treated at two U.S. Navy clinics, none met the strictest definition of wasting, while 63 percent were overweight or obese.
Now that percentage is same as Americans in general, for a fact 66 percent of the American population is overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“In the 1980s, the longer people had HIV, the more wasting they had, but now the longer people have it, the more likely they are to gain too much weight,” said Nancy Crum-Cianflone, MD, MPH, lead author of the study and HIV research physician with the TriService AIDS Clinical Consortium, San Diego. “Doctors have been caught up in saving people’s lives and keeping opportunistic infections at bay, but today those rates are low and people are living longer. Now we need to start focusing on regular health issues like cancer prevention, blood pressure control, and excess weight gain.”
The good news if any here is that, the overweight people carrying the HIV/AIDS virus are actually more likely to be healthier that the ones who’ve lost a lot of weight, as it shows that they are being taken care of and the disease is being managed successfully. According to the estimates of CDC more than a third of HIV positive people aren’t being taken care of.
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