NEW STUDY RESULTS AGEHIV COHORT STUDY, INCLUDING THE COVID-19 SUBSTUDY
Also in 2021, plenty of research has been done by the AGEhIV Cohort Study group. Firstly, AGEhIV study physician Sebastiaan Verboeket wrote an article on weight gain after switching to an integrase inhibitor (a particular class of HIV medication) in AGEhIV study participants. No difference in the mean weight gain over time was found between people with HIV switching to an integrase inhibitor, people with HIV who did not switch to an integrase inhibitor and people without HIV. However, a large increase in weight (10% or more) was more often seen in those people switching to an integrase inhibitor. On this website’s Results page you can find more details about this research.
Previous research on lung function at the start of the AGEhIV Cohort Study indicated that the lungs of participants with HIV may have been stiffer and could contain less air in total. Sebastiaan Verboeket has now investigated how the lung function changes over time in people with and without HIV. The main result was that both the total amount of air that the lungs can contain and the one-second value (the amount of air breathed out in one second) decreased slightly faster in participants with HIV (most of whom had a well-suppressed virus) compared to participants without HIV, even if they did not smoke. It is currently unclear to what extent people with HIV will notice this decrease themselves. For more details, please visit the Results page on this website.
Finally, AGEhIV study physician Myrthe Verburgh looked at the risk of getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 among participants of the AGEhIV COVID-19 substudy, which started in September 2020 (see more information about this substudy on this page). The main outcome was that participants with HIV did not have a higher risk of contracting a SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to participants without HIV. Also, the nucleocapsid (N) antibody levels were similar between participants with and without HIV. Antibodies against the N-protein of SARS-CoV-2, unlike antibodies against the spike protein, are only formed after natural infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can find more details about this research here.
If you have questions regarding these new study results, please contact one of the study physicians: m.l.verburgh@amsterdamumc.nl or i.a.j.vanderwulp@amsterdamumc.nl
