Many of those living with HIV face a new life-threatening challenge: cancer
Monday, June 6, 2011 - 09:00
in Health & Medicine
As the world marks the 30-year anniversary of the first reporting of HIV/AIDS, now comes the realization of a new challenge for people with the incurable disease. For reasons not yet clear, people with HIV face a higher rate of cancers not usually associated with HIV. This increasing rate of "non-AIDS defining cancers" includes lung, head and neck, liver, kidney, and anal cancers, among others. The alarming uptick in cancer rates highlights the critical need to understand how to treat tumors in people taking highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) for HIV. Given what is known about HAART drug interactions, can newer targeted cancer therapies be given safely to patients with HIV?