Study links HIV infection to heart attack risk

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Being HIV-positive raises a person's heart attack risk by about 50 per cent, said a study released on Monday that confirms earlier findings.

The study looked at 82,459 United States veterans, the vast majority of them men. It was published in Archives of Internal Medicine, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It said that in three age groups, the average incidence of heart attack was consistently and significantly higher for people who are HIV-positive, compared to uninfected veterans.

After adjusting for illness, smoking, alcohol consumption and risk factors such as high blood pressure and cholesterol, the HIV-positive subjects in the study had a 50 per cent higher risk of heart attack than uninfected people.