Prevalence and correlates of anaemia in a large cohort of HIV-positive women

Researchers studied a cross section of HIV-positive women, to compare the prevalence and correlation of anaemia occurring in patients with asymptomatic HIV infection versus clinical HIV.

Test subjects included racially mixed 2056 HIV-positive and 569 HIV-negative women who were categorized demographically and clinically, as their immunological and virological relationships to anaemia were studied. In overall comparison between all test subjects regardless of race, the data concluded that anaemia was more prevalent among HIV-positive patients at 37 percent compared to 17 percent of HIV negative women.

Among the HIV-positive women, 44.9 percent of black women showed a stronger incidence of anaemia with haemoglobin levels of < 12 g/dl, followed by 25.7 percent of whites and 24.8 percent of Hispanics. Using mean corpuscular volume (MCV) as another standard for testing revealed that women with low MCV were more susceptible to anaemia regardless of HIV status.

Levine AM, Berhane K, Masri-Lavine L et al. Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (01/01/01) Vol. 26, No. 1, P. 28.