Longtime Pozzers Face Senior Years With Lengthy List Of Debilitating Illnesses

As more people living with HIV/AIDS move into their senior years, the toll of the medications and unforeseen damage from the virus is beginning to surface. Today the New York Times has published a grim article depicting life for some long-term AIDS survivors. This should be required reading for young gay men who think that seroconverting merely means a lifetime of taking a pill every morning.

CHICAGO — John Holloway received a diagnosis of AIDS nearly two decades ago, when the disease was a speedy death sentence and treatment a distant dream.

Yet at 59 he is alive, thanks to a cocktail of drugs that changed the course of an epidemic. But with longevity has come a host of unexpected medical conditions, which challenge the prevailing view of AIDS as a manageable, chronic disease.

Mr. Holloway, who lives in a housing complex designed for the frail elderly, suffers from complex health problems usually associated with advanced age: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, kidney failure, a bleeding ulcer, severe depression, rectal cancer and the lingering effects of a broken hip.

Those illnesses, more severe than his 84-year-old father’s, are not what Mr. Holloway expected when lifesaving antiretroviral drugs became the standard of care in the mid-1990s.

The drugs gave Mr. Holloway back his future.

But at what cost?

Very little research has been done into the long-term effects of the virus and the medications.

There have been only small, inconclusive studies on the causes of aging-related health problems among AIDS patients.

Without definitive research, which has just begun, that second wave of suffering could be a coincidence, although it is hard to find anyone who thinks so.

Instead, experts are coming to believe that the immune system and organs of long-term survivors took an irreversible beating before the advent of lifesaving drugs and that those very drugs then produced additional complications because of their toxicity — a one-two punch.

“The sum total of illnesses can become overwhelming,” said Charles A. Emlet, an associate professor at the University of Washington at Tacoma and a leading H.I.V. and aging researcher, who sees new collaborations between specialists that will improve care.

“AIDS is a very serious disease, but longtime survivors have come to grips with it,” Dr. Emlet continued, explaining that while some patients experienced unpleasant side effects from the antiretrovirals, a vast majority found a cocktail they could tolerate. “Then all of a sudden they are bombarded with a whole new round of insults, which complicate their medical regime and have the potential of being life threatening. That undermines their sense of stability and makes it much more difficult to adjust.”

Larry Kramer speaks about HIV meds: “How long will the human body be able to tolerate that constant bombardment? Well, we are now seeing that many bodies can’t. Once again, just as we thought we were out of the woods, sort of, we have good reason again to be really scared.”

RELATED: Jane Gross, author of the above-linked article, also wrote the excellent NY Times article on senior gays. Visit SAGE, Services and Advocacy for Senior Gays, for more information. For information about older adults with HIV, visit the AIDS Community Research Initiative Of America.