Excess Mortality among HIV-Infected Individuals with Cancer in the United States

Background: Human immunodefieciency virus (HIV)-infected persons are living longer in the era of effective HIV treatment, resulting in an increasing cancer burden in this population. The combined effects of HIV and cancer on mortality are incompletely understood.

Methods: We examined whether individuals with both HIV and cancer have excess mortality using data from the HIV/AIDS Cancer Match Study and the National Center for Health Statistics (1996–2010). We compared age, sex, and race-stratified mortality between people with and without HIV or one of the following cancers: lung, breast, prostate, colorectum, anus, Hodgkin lymphoma, or non-Hodgkin lymphoma. We utilized additive Poisson regression models that included terms for HIV, cancer, and an interaction for their combined effect on mortality. We report the number of excess deaths per 1,000 person-years for models with a significant interaction (P < 0.05).

Results: For all cancers examined except prostate cancer, at least one demographic subgroup of HIV-infected cancer patients experienced significant excess mortality. Excess mortality was most pronounced at younger ages (30–49 years), with large excesses for males with lung cancer (white race: 573 per 1,000 person-years; non-white: 503) and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (white: 236; non-white: 261), and for females with Hodgkin lymphoma (white: 216; non-white: 136) and breast cancer (non-white: 107).

Conclusions: In the era of effective HIV treatment, overall mortality in patients with both HIV and cancer was significantly higher than expected on the basis of mortality rates for each disease separately.

Impact: These results suggest that HIV may contribute to cancer progression and highlight the importance of improved cancer prevention and care for the U.S. HIV population. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 26(7); 1027–33. ©2017 AACR.

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