Note: This research was supported by CTSI's Tenderloin Clinical Research Center, one of eight clinical sites in the Bay Area managed by the Clinical Research Services program.
By Jeff Sheehy
In a groundbreaking study published last year, scientists reported that effective treatment with HIV medications not only restores health and prolongs life in many HIV-infected patients, but also curtails transmission to sexual partners up to ninety-seven percent. However, a new study by UCSF scientists shows that lack of basic living needs severely undercuts these advances in impoverished men.
The new research builds on a 2010 finding by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that poverty is the single biggest factor linked to HIV infection in heterosexuals living in inner-city neighborhoods.
In the new study published in the April 25 issue of PLoS ONE, UCSF researchers found that for HIV-infected homeless and unstably housed individuals, a failure to address unmet subsistence needs such as housing, food, clothing and hygiene, undermines these very real individual and public health benefits of HIV medication delivery.
“In this study, we followed a group of homeless and unstably housed HIV-infected people living in San Francisco and found that only about a fifth of those for whom antiretroviral therapy was medically indicated were actually on the medications. More importantly, while viral load was one of the most important predictors of overall health, we found that an inability to meet basic subsistence needs had an even larger influence on health status in this population,” said the study’s principal investigator, Elise Riley, PhD, Associate Professor in the UCSF HIV/AIDS Division at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
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