First, since nobody really knows what will happen to anyone at any time, let's just take a moment to appreciate that you are in love with a wonderful partner. That said, what is the life expectancy of someone with HIV? We don't know exactly, but we know it depends on many factors. In poor countries where people don't have access to HIV treatments, AIDS has cut the life expectancy of entire populations almost by half. Rich countries have begun to mobilize money and efforts to start treating people in those areas, but we have a long way to go. In the early days of the epidemic in the United States, the answer to your question would have been simple and hard to take: before we had good HIV treatments, people with HIV could expect to become ill with AIDS within about 10 years after becoming infected, and then lived only 1-2 years on average after being diagnosed with AIDS. Now that good HIV treatments are available (at least to those who can afford them, or qualify for insurance, or live in places where government-sponsored treatment programs haven't been cut) those who take the medicines as prescribed tend to do very well. We also have better blood tests to help decide who should start treatment, to monitor how well treatment is working against the virus, and to help choose a new treatment if an old one stops working. So the good news is that we can't tell exactly what the life expectancy is for a person with HIV, because the medications and tests have only been around for 10 years or less, and people are living longer than that. What we are starting to see is that deaths among people with HIV are now caused more and more by things like injuries and heart attacks, rather than by AIDS. Heart disease may be related to HIV or its treatments, but it seems that if people have their cholesterol monitored and take medication to lower it as needed, stop smoking, and take care of other risk factors like high blood pressure, the risk of heart attack should be greatly reduced. Liver disease seems to be particularly a problem in people who have both hepatitis C and HIV, and those people should receive specialized medical care and possibly treatment for hepatitis C. But overall in the United States and Canada, it looks as though people with HIV are living long enough to die from causes other than AIDS. Unfortunately, some people use this good news to justify not protecting themselves or their partners from HIV infection. So we should keep in mind some other possibilities: that, as the years go by, we will start to see long-term effects of HIV infection that we don't yet know about, or HIV treatments may lose their effectiveness, or the treatments themselves will have long-term side effects. It's also important to remember that some people can't take the medications because of side effects or other health problems, and untreated HIV infection remains a deadly disease. We need to remain watchful and keep supporting public health, treatment, and research programs to keep HIV under control, and deal with whatever comes up in the long term. But with proper medical care, life expectancy with HIV is much, much longer than it was 10 years ago. |
