Antiretroviral Therapy Helps HIV-Positive Patients Live as Long as General Population

Over the years, antiretroviral therapies have proven to be effective in helping those living with HIV have healther, longer lives. 

While it's estimated that more than 35 million people now live with HIV/AIDS, more advanced antiretroviral continue to increase that life estimate. 

According to researchers from the British Columbia Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and the North American AIDS Cohort Collaboration on Research and Design, they examined individual's life expectancy rates from 2000 to 2007.  From 2006 to 2007, HIV-infected people were estimated to live another 51 years.

Researchers concluded that a 20-year-old person with HIV has the potential to live into his or her 70s, which is close to around the same age of the general population.

"I don't think, in all honesty, that there has been an area of medicine that has undergone (as big a) revolutionary evolution over our lifetime as HIV has," said study author Dr. Julio Montaner, the director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS to The Vancouver Sun, reported by TIME. "[The drugs are] simpler and safer and better tolerated, so people are able to take these treatments better and also for a longer period of time."

He added that, "There are many reasons to believe that people living with HIV, although they are now trending towards near-normal life expectancy, may face additional challenges as they age. We do see what appears to be accelerated aging among people infected with HIV that have been living with HIV for a long time. But it's premature for us to conclude whether this is going to be a generalized phenomenon or not."

More information regarding the study can be found via the journal PLOS ONE.