"I think that what we are seeing is a real effect. Now whether it’s generalizable to other cohorts is going to be an important question, and our work with the Lung HIV Consortium, which is a multicenter site, will hopefully answer that question," he said. "But I think that what we are seeing is individuals who are living longer with controlled HIV, so we may be seeing much like we see accelerated cardiovascular disease [and] accelerated nephrotoxicity – that maybe the lungs are now implicated as another end organ of chronic HIV infection even when controlled."
He acknowledged that it was hard in this study to tease apart the effects of smoking and HIV on lung function, given that most of the cohort smoked. But on the flip side, "it makes it nice because it’s a homogenous population, to get rid of the effect of smoking."
Dr. Drummond disclosed that he had no relevant conflicts of interest.