Originally published November 3 2005
UCLA study shows how a patient's wealth factors into the quality of their AIDS treatment
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
According to a study led by Dr. William Cunningham at UCLA, AIDS patients of lower socioeconomic status die more quickly than patients who have greater wealth.
These findings are of concern given the high rates of HIV among patients with low socioeconomic status (SES), according to the study, led by Dr. William Cunningham, professor of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
"There's still reason for alarm because the groups that are most likely to get infected are less likely to get treatment and are dying at much higher rates.
The article is published in the November issue of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved (JHCPU 16.4).
Prior research has shown that HIV-infected patients from a low socioeconomic background, as well as racial and ethnic minorities, receive fewer health services, including treatment with Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART).
They studied 2,864 adults receiving HIV care, basing their work on independent variables such as wealth (i.e. net accumulated financial assets), annual income, educational attainment, employment status, race/ethnicity, medical insurance, and use of services and of medications at the beginning of the study.
The patients in the low socioeconomic group had less than $50,000 in accumulated wealth and annual incomes below $25,000, did not have high school degrees, and were unemployed.
The researchers focused on deaths between January 1996 and December 2000.
Patients who had no accumulated financial assets had an 89 percent greater chance of dying than those with more wealth, and those with less than a high school education had a 53 percent greater risk of death.
A partial explanation for the findings may be that patients with low SES tend to use HAART and ambulatory care services less relative to other patients, but had a higher use of emergency room services and hospital care, Cunningham said.
They are also less likely to have private insurance and are either uninsured or covered by public insurance such as Medicaid and Medicare.
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