About one-third (35 percent) of AIDS patients diagnosed with the first opportunistic infection from 1997 to 2012 in San Francisco died within five years, according to a study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
The study drew on 30 years of data from more than 20,000 AIDS patients collected by the San Francisco Department of Public Health on initial and subsequent AIDS-defining opportunistic infections.
Opportunistic infections used to be much more deadly — from 1981 to 1986, just 7 percent of patients in San Francisco lived for more than five years after their first opportunistic infection. Now, advances made in antiretroviral therapy and improvements in treatment of opportunistic illnesses have helped boost the survival rate.
"While recent research suggests that many opportunistic infections in the U.S. are now less common and, oftentimes, less lethal, we cannot forget about them," said Kpandja Djawe, PhD, the study's lead author. "We need to keep them in mind, even in the context of the changing epidemiology of HIV."