On Tuesday, we discussed an article in The New York Times focusing on the increased risk of heart attack that HIV-positive patients face. In the Times piece, the writer discussed a study published last month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, pointing out that HIV patients are four-times more likely to experience a sudden heart attack, compared to those not infected with the virus.
After reading our Dispatch story, a co-author of the study, Dr. Zian H. Tseng, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in to correct us, as well as The Times. Please read his comments below:
One important distinction not adequately made in The New York Times piece is that our new finding is of an association between HIV and sudden cardiac death (SCD), not heart attack. Previous research has well established the link between coronary disease, heart attack, and HIV, but this is the first study to directly address the issue of SCD, in which the victim dies within minutes of symptom onset, most often due to fatal ventricular arrhythmia. While SCD accounts for ~50 percent of cardiac deaths in the general population, in the HIV cohort we studied, SCD accounted for over 80 percent of cardiac deaths.
We greatly appreciate Dr. Tseng s correction.