According to a study by UCLA researchers and colleagues, HIV has an “early and substantial” impact on the aging of infected people, accelerating the biological changes in the body associated with normal aging in just two or more years. three years after infection.
The results suggest that new HIV infection can rapidly shorten a person’s life by almost five years relative to an uninfected person.
Our work shows that even in the first months and years of living with HIV, the virus has already set in motion a process of accelerated aging at the DNA level. This emphasizes the critical importance of early HIV diagnosis and awareness of aging-related issues, as well as the value of preventing HIV infection in the first place. “
Elizabeth Crabb Breen, lead author, professor emeritus at UCLA’s Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and psychiatry and bioconductive sciences at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine
The study is published today in the peer-reviewed journal iScience.
Previous research has suggested that antiretroviral and HIV therapies used to keep infection under control are associated with an earlier onset of age-related conditions that are often associated with aging, such as childhood diseases. heart and kidney, fragility and cognitive difficulties.
The research team looked at stored blood samples from 102 men collected six months or less before they became infected with HIV and again two or three years after infection. They compared them with matching samples of 102 uninfected men of the same age taken during the same time period. The authors say this study is the first to pair infected and uninfected people in this way. All men participated in the multicenter cohort study on AIDS, an ongoing nationwide study begun in 1984.
The researchers focused on how HIV affects epigenetic methylation of DNA, a process that cells use to turn genes on or off in the course of normal physiological changes. Epigenetic changes are those that respond to the influence of the environment, people’s behaviors or other external factors -; as the disease -; which affect the behavior of genes without changing the genes themselves.
The team examined five epigenetic measures of aging. Four of them are known as epigenetic “clocks,” each of which uses a slightly different approach to estimating the acceleration of biological age in years, relative to chronological age. The fifth measure assessed the length of telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes that progressively shorten with age as cells divide, until they become so short that division is no longer possible.
HIV-infected individuals showed a significant acceleration of age in each of the four measures of the epigenetic clock -; ranging from 1.9 to 4.8 years -; as well as telomere shortening during the period that begins just before infection and ends two or three years later, in the absence of highly active antiretroviral treatment. No similar age acceleration was observed in uninfected participants during the same time interval.
“Our access to rare and well-characterized samples allowed us to design this study in a way that leaves little doubt about the role of HIV in obtaining biological signatures from early aging,” the lead author said. Beth Jamieson, professor of the hematology division. and oncology at the Geffen school. “Our long-term goal is to determine whether we can use any of these signatures to predict whether an individual is at increased risk for specific outcomes of aging-related diseases, thus setting out new goals for intervention therapy.” .
The researchers noted some limitations of the study. It included only men, so the results may not be applicable to women. In addition, the number of non-white participants was small and the sample size was insufficient to account for the subsequent effects of highly active antiretroviral treatment or to predict clinical outcomes.
There is still no consensus on what constitutes normal aging or how to define it, the researchers wrote.
The Multicentre AIDS Cohort Study, or MACS, is a large-scale research project that uses demographic factors, habits, disease history, and sexual history among men who have sex with men to examine the natural and treated history of HIV infection and AIDS. It is one of the few cohort studies in the world that has biological samples available before and after HIV infection documented in the same individuals. In 2019, the MACS was combined with the Interagency HIV Study to form the MACS / WIHS Combined Cohort Study, or MWCCS.
Source:
University of California – Los Angeles Health Sciences
Magazine reference:
Breen, EC, et al. (2022) Accelerated aging with HIV begins at the time of initial HIV infection. iScience. doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104488.