Comorbidity diagnoses and risk scores in women with and without HIV

Project Summary

Women living with HIV (WLWH) face unique age-related challenges compared with women without HIV. WLWH are at greater risk of developing age-related comorbidities and tend to develop these conditions earlier in life with greater severity. That said, the primary driving forces behind these differences remain uncertain. The BC CARMA CHIWOS Collaboration (BCC3) has been used to examine comorbidity prevalence in British Columbian WLWH and a matched cohort of women without HIV. However, BCC3 studies have not shown the expected differences in age-related comorbidities, perhaps due to the high degree of sociodemographic similarity between the two cohorts. We therefore propose a project in which we will compare the burden of age-related comorbidities between BCC3 WLWH and control cohorts and a cohort of women from the CLSA study. We will examine physical and mental comorbidities, comorbidity risk scores, and the sociodemographic factors that impact these conditions.