Researchers of a study sought to assess the incidence of peripheral arterial disease (PAD) among patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which is a known risk factor of cardiovascular disease (CVD). The study was published in The International Journal of Lower Extremity Wounds.

In this study, authors prospectively recruited 892 patients with HIV (mean age, 42 years; 51% were male) from an outpatient clinic. They then analyzed ankle-brachial index (ABI) by allocating patients into three ABI levels: an ABI ≤0.90 was considered abnormal and evidence of PAD, an ABI 1.0 to 1.40 was considered normal, and 0.91 to 0.99 was considered borderline. In total, there were 704, 149, and 39 patients in the normal, borderline, and abnormal ABI groups, respectively.

Patients with HIV in the abnormal group were considered to have PAD, yielding a prevalence of over 4%. Independent risk factors correlated with PAD included being a female (odds ratio [OR], 2.86; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.94-4.22), being under the age of 30 (OR, 4.66; 95% CI, 2.78-7.81), being overweight with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 to 25.9 kg/m2 (OR, 0.39; 95% CI, 0.20-0.76), and being obese with a BMI ≥30 kg/m2 (OR, 3.53; 95% CI: 1.51-8.22).

The researchers concluded that “the prevalence of PAD in HIV-infected Thais was 4.37% in infected patients on therapy attending outpatient clinics. For this population, PAD appears to be relatively poorly correlated with traditional risk factors of CVD.”

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33900138/

Keywords: adults living with HIV, ankle-brachial index, subclinical peripheral arterial diseases