Cancer Death Rates Associated With Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection in the United States

Extract

Studies (1ߝ8) of the effect of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection on cancer incidence rates have all shown that rates of Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) are greatly increased among persons infected with HIV but have had conflicting results concerning other cancers. Analysis of death rates offers another way to investigate the spectrum of cancers associated with HIV infection.

The National Center for Health Statistics compiles data from all death certificates of U.S. residents annually. We selected death certificates from 1990 through 1995 with any mention of cancer, regardless of whether cancer was reported as the underlying cause of death (9). We analyzed 28 categories of cancer based on all codes for cancers in the International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision (10). Supplemental codes for HIV infection identified cancer deaths with HIV infection as a concurrent cause of death (11). We limited our analysis to persons aged 25-44 years, a group in which HIV infection had become the leading cause of death (11) but in which the death rate from cancers had been relatively low before the HIV epidemic.