HIV patients with a low socioeconomic status are likelier to die much more often than patients with higher levels of wealth and education, a new UCLA study has found.
These findings are of concern given the high rates of HIV among patients with low socioeconomic status (SES), according to the study, led by Dr. William Cunningham, professor of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
"It's among these groups that the infection is increasing most rapidly, even though there are better treatments available than we used to have," said Cunningham, also a professor of public health. "There's still reason for alarm because the groups that are most likely to get infected are less likely to get treatment and are dying at much higher rates. We need to look at improving care and find ways to help the low socioeconomic status population, and we would recommend more resources being put toward those groups."
The article is published in the November issue of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved (JHCPU 16.4).
Prior research has shown that HIV-infected patients from a low socioeconomic background, as well as racial and ethnic minorities, receive fewer health services, including treatment with Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART). The researchers examined whether these patients also had higher mortality rates than others. They studied 2,864 adults receiving HIV care, basing their work on independent variables such as wealth (i.e. net accumulated financial assets), annual income, educational attainment, employment status, race/ethnicity, medical insurance, and use of services and of medications at the beginning of the study . The patients in the low socioeconomic group had less than $50,000 in accumulated wealth and annual incomes below $25,000, did not have high school degrees, and were unemployed. The researchers focused on deaths between January 1996 and December 2000.