Yale’s School of Medicine launched a new center dedicated to researching strategies to support healthy aging in people with HIV, according to a university news release.
More than half of the 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States are ages 50 and older. The HIV population is aging thanks to effective treatment that enables people to live longer and healthier lives. As a result, managing age-related conditions is a growing focus of HIV care. But older people with HIV face some special challenges, including isolation, stigma and comorbidities, according to POZ’s Basics on HIV and Aging.
Yale’s new center—the Aging Well with HIV Through Alcohol Research and Risk Reduction and Education (AWAR3E) Center—is a multicohort, interdisciplinary hub that will translate research into practical strategies, including ways to increase lifespan, improve quality of life and reduce the alcohol-related risks of chronic, low-grade inflammation (“inflammaging”). The center will research and address other aging-related health problems as well, such as falls, fractures and dementia.
The center is funded by a five-year grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and led by Amy Justice, MD, PhD, a professor of internal medicine and public health at the Yale School of Medicine; Julie Womack, MSN, PhD, an associate professor of nursing at the Yale School of Nursing; and Vin Lo Re, MD, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.
AWAR3E builds on four existing HIV cohorts: the Veterans Aging Cohort Study, the Women’s Interagency HIV Study, the Observational Pharmaco-Epidemiology Research and Analysis and Mount Sinai HIV.
“By uniting multiple cohorts and disciplines, AWAR3E will deliver the most comprehensive picture to date of inflammaging in people with HIV and how alcohol use shapes risk and resilience,” said Justice in the release. “Our goal is to identify the right biomarkers, the outcomes that matter most to patients and the real-world treatments that can make aging with HIV healthier for everyone.”
Insights from AWAR3E will benefit patients and communities nationwide and lay the foundation for future alcohol-focused interventions designed for people with HIV that reduce inflammaging, prevent conditions associated with aging and improve quality of life.
“AWAR3E will deliver integrated science that quickly informs practice,” Womack said in the release. “The [grant] positions Yale and our partners at the forefront of understanding and mitigating inflammaging so that people with HIV can thrive as they age.”
Additionally, the center aims to train and inspire the next generation of health care professionals.
“From my standpoint, aside from the terrific science that we will advance with our new center, one of the big benefits of our new center is that it will nurture the generation of significant research in alcohol-HIV/AIDS research, provide valuable mentorship to early-stage investigators and attract scientists new to alcohol-HIV/AIDS research,” Lo Re wrote in a statement to the Yale Daily News.
To learn more, click #Aging and #Long-Term Survivors. There, you’ll see headlines such as “Older Adults With HIV Face Higher Risk of Opioid Use Disorder,” “Why Brittle Bones Aren’t Just a Woman’s Problem” and “Why Are More Older People Dying After Falls?”
