AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, September 18, 2000
Prepared by AIDS Weekly editors from staff and other reports

NewsRx -- Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) appears to reduce the incidence of anemia in HIV infected women.

"Anemia is common in HIV infected women, and correlates with higher HIV RNA levels in blood, lower CD4 cells, clinical AIDS, use of zidovudine (AZT), low MCV of red cells, and African American (AA) ethnicity (A.M. Levine, Blood, 1999)," reported Kiros Berhane, University of Southern California, and colleagues from USC and other institutions. "We wished to determine the effect of HAART and other variables over time on hemoglobin (Hb) levels in HIV infected women."

Berhane et al. presented data from their study at the 36th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, held in New Orleans, Louisiana. The title of their presentation was "Relationship between highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) and anemia in a large cohort of HIV infected women (Women's Interagency HIV Study - WIHS)."¹

The researchers included 2,078 participants of the Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS) who had completed a baseline visit between October 1994 and November 1995 and a last follow-up visit after April 1996 (when HAART became widely used). They used logistic regression to examine longitudinal trends of anemia in the women. In the group, 1,575 were free of anemia at baseline.

Of these 1,575, Berhane et al. found that AA ethnicity (OR=1.9, pless than or equal to.01); low CD4 cells (OR=2.9, p<.01); high HIV RNA (OR=1.7, p=.02); low MCV (OR=7.1, p<.01); AIDS (OR=1.7, p=.02); and AZT use in the past six months (OR=2.2, p<.01) were positively associated with the eventual onset of anemia.

HAART use for at least 18 months, however, was significantly associated with a reduced risk of developing anemia (OR=0.33, p<.01).

There were 503 women in the study who were anemic at baseline. The researchers observed that the use of HAART for greater than or equal to18 months (OR=2.9, p<.01) and increasing CD4 cells (OR=2.3, p=.03) were associated with a resolution of anemia in these patients. If AZT use was continued in their antiretroviral regimen, it prevented improvements in their Hb level (OR=0.40, p<.01).

"We concluded that HAART therapy has a protective effect on the development of anemia in HIV positive women, and that use of HAART in anemic patients is associated with improvements in Hb levels over time," stated Berhane et al. "These effects are abrogated when AZT is used in the HAART regimen."

The corresponding author for this study is Kiros Berhane, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA.

A search of the www.NewsRx.com online database using the terms "anemia" and "HIV" yielded 131 articles.

Key points reported in this study are:

• Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) reduces the incidence of anemia in HIV infected women
  


• HAART therapy for greater than or equal to18 months also improves hemoglobin levels in previously anemic HIV infected women
  


• Zidovudine (AZT) therapy abrogates these effects
  

This article was prepared by AIDS Weekly editors from staff and other reports.

Reference

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