Women and HIV: More Work to Be Done

Since the introduction of combination antiretroviral therapy (ART), HIV-related death rates have declined dramatically in the U.S. However, the magnitude of the decline has been lower for women than for men. Searching for an explanation, investigators examined temporal trends, causes, and predictors of death from 1995 through 2004 for a large group of HIV-infected women in the U.S. (the Women's Interagency HIV Study cohort).

Although the standardized mortality ratio (i.e., the observed number of deaths divided by the expected number, using age-specific rates from a standard population) fell from 24.7 in 1996 to a mean of 10.3 between 2001 and 2004, it appears to have plateaued at that level. As seen in other cohorts, the proportion of deaths…