January 29, 2009

Non-AIDS Cancers on the Rise

The percentage of HIV-positive people diagnosed with non-AIDS-related cancers, particularly hepatitis-related cancers, increased between 2000 and 2005, according to a study published online January 28 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Rates of AIDS-related cancers such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and lymphoma have decreased or stabilized since the introduction of combination antiretroviral (ARV) therapy. But a growing number of studies, however, suggest rates of potentially fatal non-AIDS-related cancers, such as liver and lung cancer may be increasing.

To explore cancer mortality trends among people with HIV, Fabrice Bonnet, MD, PhD, from the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), and his colleagues conducted a survey of deaths among HIV-positive patients in France in 2005 and compared it with a similar survey conducted in 2000. In all, 1,042 deaths were reported in 2005, up from 964 in 2000. Thirty-four percent of the deaths in 2005 were due to cancer, compared with 29 percent in 2000. This increase was statistically significant, meaning that the difference was too great to have occurred by chance.

The rate of AIDS-related cancers among those who died either dropped or, in the case of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, remained stable. The rate of non-AIDS-related cancers, however, particularly cancers associated with hepatitis, nearly doubled, prompting the authors to recommend better cancer screening and monitoring among people with HIV.

Search: Cancer, lung cancer, hepatitis, liver, kaposi's sarcoma, lymphoma, Fabrice Bonet, INSERM

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