HIV accelerates aging by 5 years

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HIV-infected people showed significant age acceleration in four epigenetic “clock” measurements, ranging from 1.9 to 4.8 years, an acceleration that was not seen in non-infected people.

DNA level changes can hasten aging by roughly five years, according to a UCLA-led study.

According to experts at the University of California, Los Angeles, HIV has an “early and substantial” influence on aging in infected patients, accelerating biological changes in the body associated with normal aging within two to three years of infection.

According to the results, a new HIV infection may shorten an individual’s life expectancy by approximately five years when compared to an uninfected person.

“Our work demonstrates that even in the early months and years of living with HIV, the virus has already set into motion an accelerated aging process at the DNA level,” said lead author Elizabeth Crabb Breen, a professor emerita at UCLA’s Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “This emphasizes the critical importance of early HIV diagnosis and an awareness of aging-related problems, as well as the value of preventing HIV infection in the first place.”

The study was recently published in iScience.

Previous studies have revealed that HIV and antiretroviral treatments used to manage the infection are linked to an earlier start of age-related diseases such as heart and kidney disease, frailty, and cognitive impairments.

The researchers focused on how HIV affects epigenetic DNA methylation, a process cells use to turn genes on or off in the course of normal physiological changes. Epigenetic changes are those made in response to the influence of environment, people’s behaviors or other outside factors — such as disease — that affect how genes behave without changing the genes themselves.

The team examined five epigenetic measures of aging. Four of them are what are known as epigenetic “clocks,” each of which uses a slightly different approach to estimate biological age acceleration in years, relative to chronologic age. The fifth measure assessed the length of telomeres, the protective cap-like ends of chromosomes that become progressively shorter with age as cells divide, until they become so short that division is no longer possible.

HIV-infected individuals showed significant age acceleration in each of the four epigenetic clock measurements — ranging from 1.9 to 4.8 years — as well as telomere shortening over the period beginning just before infection and ending two to three years after, in the absence of highly active antiretroviral treatment. Similar age acceleration was not seen in the non-infected participants over the same time interval.

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