AMSTERDAM — In a surprising finding, U.S. researchers reported Monday that there appear to be no differences between men and women in how quickly they become sick or die from AIDS, nor are there gaps in the rates at which each receives AIDS-related therapies.
In recent years, some activists and researchers have insisted that women grow sick faster than men and have less access to treatments. In part, the reason for this may be that early in the epidemic, the disease was often diagnosed in women later than men because clinicians were not looking for the signs of AIDS in women. During that time, acquired immune deficiency syndrome was primarily striking gay men.
"These investigations are important, particularly because this is the first large, prospective study to show that men and women share similar consequences of their HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) disease," said Lawrence R. Deyton, assistant director for community research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The results were presented at the eighth International Conference on AIDS. Nearly 11,000 researchers, activists and others from more than 130 countries are attending the meeting, which is considered the most important forum for the exchange of information about the deadly disease.
In a study of 4,202 men and women, Dr. Renslow Sherer, director of the HIV primary care center at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, found that HIV-infected women and men do not differ significantly in the illnesses they develop or their rates of death.
Investigators collected data on the participants every six months during the last two years. Seventy percent of them were between 30 and 49 years of age. Forty percent were black, 18% Latino and 42% white. Nearly one-fifth of the women and nearly one-third of the men used drugs intravenously, a practice that can spread the virus.
In a second report, Dr. Linnea Capps, assistant clinical professor of medicine at Columbia University and attending physician at Harlem Hospital in New York, found no significant differences based on gender for those receiving antiviral treatment and therapy for pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a common AIDS-related opportunistic infection.
However, the study showed that people under 35--regardless of their gender--were less likely than older people to receive either treatment. The investigators do not know why this occurs, but they speculated that younger people may seek medical care less frequently or tend to be generally less compliant with medical regimens.
