Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Current study is aimed to observe survival trend in HIV/AIDS patients and to explore the impact of ADRs experienced during HAART on survival trends of the patients. METHODS: An observational retrospective study of all patients diagnosed of HIV infection and on HAART therapy from Jan 2007 to Dec 2012 was conducted at infectious disease department of Hospital Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. The survival function was observed on Kaplan-Meir survival analysis and Cox-regression for survival function. Data was descriptively analyzed by using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS 20). RESULTS: Out of 792 patients that underwent HAART therapy, 607 (76.6%) were male and 185 (23.3%) were female patients. The probability of 6 years survival was compared where the overall median follow up time of all patients was 36 months or 3 years (inter-quartile range 33.5-38.4). On Kaplan-Meir survival function analysis, better survival probability were observed among non-smokers (p 0.194), non-alcoholics (p 0.002), and non-drug abusers (p < 0.001). Overall 338 (42.6%) patients had experienced adverse drug reactions where a total number of 449 (56.7%) adverse drug reactions were reported among which 329 (73.2%) occurred in males and 120 (26.8%) in female patients. The survival probability with significant association (p < 0.001) among patients with absence of ADR were reported higher on Kaplan-Meir survival. On Cox-regression survival analysis, Alcoholic patients (HR 1.14, p 0.02), drug abusers (HR 1.38, p 0.01) and patients with ADRs (HR 0.65, p < 0.001) shows a higher risk for death with higher Hazard ratio. CONCLUSIONS: The study indicates that a patient's life-style and occurrence of ADRs has a direct impact on survival probability in HIV/AIDS patients which shows a greater risk to death and poor survival. However, a multicenter study with a large sample size may provide us with better understanding of this relationship.