HIV Positive More Likely To Develop Certain Cancers: Study

HIVdefine positivedefine patients also carry a high risk of developing some common cancerdefine types than the population at large, a new study unfolds. The study reports the largest analysis of cancer trends among HIV-infected people in the United States.

Also, cancers like Kaposi's sarcoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma long been associated with HIV positive patients, no longer top the charts, with other cancers coming on the rise among these patients, the researchers said.

To compare the cancerdefine incidence among HIVdefine-infected persons with incidence in the general population, the study focused on the trends between 1992 and 2003.

The study looked into the medical records of 54,780 men and women carrying the HIV virus.

While by 2003, HIV-infected patients were less likely to develop prostate cancerdefine, they carried a 59 times higher risk of developing cancerous anal tumors than the general population.

Additionally, their chances of developing Hodgkin’s disease were 18 times more than the overall population; they were 7 times more likely to develop liver cancer; 3.6 times more likely to develop cancer of the lungs; 3 times more likely to develop skin cancer melanoma and throat cancer and 2.4 times more likely to develop colorectal cancer, the researchers noted.

Thanks to new anti-HIV drugs, HIV is no longer untreatable. "The study was done because we all know that now people with HIV are living longer and HIV is looking more like a chronic disease. So we wanted to look at one of the other very large chronic killers in America, cancer," said Dr. Pragna Patel of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the lead researcher of the study.

As the virus ravages the body's immune systemdefine, raising susceptibility to illnesses and infections, Patel recommends that HIV-infected people should go in for regular cancer screening, thus averting life threatening cancers.

The results of the study are reported in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.