AJMC | Lymphoma outcomes hinge on oncology, not viral load in people with HIV

AJMC news story

Oncologic factors, not HIV viral suppression status, determine how well people with HIV fare after a lymphoma diagnosis, according to a retrospective cohort study published in HIV Medicine.

Lymphoma has remained one of the most common cancers in people with HIV since the earliest years of the epidemic, and that risk has persisted even as antiretroviral therapy (ART) transformed HIV from a fatal illness into a manageable chronic condition.

A 2024 protocol published in BMJ Open, outlining a planned systematic review to quantify that excess burden worldwide, noted that people with AIDS face roughly 400 times the risk of high-grade non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and about 15 times the risk of low-grade NHL compared with the general population.

Because ART has sharply reduced AIDS-defining malignancies, clinicians have debated whether virologic control should factor into how aggressively to treat a lymphoma, or whether oncologic staging and histology alone should drive therapy. A multicenter retrospective study of Spain’s CoRIS cohort set out to answer that question, comparing lymphoma outcomes between people with detectable viral load and those with sustained suppression at diagnosis.

Read the full news story here.

Further reading:

• Cancer Network | How can cooperative groups close outcome gaps in HIV-associated lymphoma?