A Prospective, Observational Study to Examine the Effects of Ageing on the Clinical Outcomes of People Living With HIV in South Korea

This study is to investigate how HIV affects ageing process, especially in Asian populations in various organ system, including brain, kidney, liver and etc. There are some articles that describing the ageing process in PWHIV, but there has been a limited number of articles that comparing ageing process by ethnicities. And the endpoints of those limited number of articles are including more general variables like all-cause mortality, detectable viral load and days to regimen changes. There is no extensive study of ageing by function of each organ system in Asia. This proposal contains more specific observation points on function/dysfxn of each organ system, especially for brain function as an MRI sub-study. The MRI sub-study has a large portion of this proposal as analysis of the neurocognitive function in HIV ageing, which has not been extensively studied in Asia, nor it hasn't been compared to other ethnic groups. With this proposal, we can see if there are differences by ethnicities compared to POPPY/COBRA results, and even if there are no differences, we can increase the number and diversify of cohort subjects and strengthen the level of evidence of cohort study. Our study, by enrolling both younger and older HIV-positive individuals with a matched HIV-negative control group, will be in the unique position to determine the effects of ageing and HIV status on chronic HIV-infection. In addition, results from this study will be well placed to assist in informing future HIV treatment guidelines on the monitoring of chronic HIV infection in older subjects and assisting in the design of future interventional studies for the treatment of age associated co-morbidities.