Posted by Our Town on November 9, 2011
By Dan Rosenblum
When many people think of AIDS or HIV, they often picture a younger person, perhaps in their twenties or thirties. But with improving medical technology and treatments that help patients live for much longer, those perceptions are becoming outdated.
Often termed the “graying of AIDS,” people 50 and older are making up a larger share of the HIV/AIDS population across America. In fact, recent statistics show the seniors’ portion of the population grew from 22 percent in 2001 to 35 percent in 2007. And the New York State Department of Health projects the number of sufferers over 65 in the state will grow from 5,000 to 30,000 by 2025.
Dan Tietz, executive director of the Manhattan-based AIDS Community Research Initiative of America, said that before recently, many patients didn’t live long enough to have a noticeable impact among senior care providers.
“But that has changed. Now HIV is, in many respects, a manageable chronic condition,” he said.
Because of this, caregivers for senior citizens are seeing a slew of new patients with HIV/AIDS. These demographic changes have happened so quickly that caregiver practices haven’t necessarily caught up to the general population. But there are some efforts to educate those caregivers.
Karol Markosky, who directs the AIDS program at the Council of Senior Centers and Services, said that better practices for dealing with older patients haven’t yet been clearly developed, but they’ve heard a lot of good input from their training programs.
She said that any professional or family caregiver should know how to deal with the mental challenges, like depression, social anxiety or isolation.
“Of course, they’re still facing the challenges of the HIV diagnosis and the challenges that go with that, but they’re also really seeing that a lot of their new challenges are just dealing with aging in general,” she said.
There are, of course, health conditions that impact older patients. Seniors in their fifties with HIV/AIDS often have the health conditions of someone 15 to 20 years older. More than 75 percent of older people with AIDS or HIV suffer from at least two other disorders unrelated to their disease (though some AIDS medications can make other disorders easier to get), most commonly depression, arthritis and hepatitis.
Caregivers in New York City are a mix of professional organizations like the Visiting Nurse Service and senior housing employees, as well as informal networks of families and friends who help elderly citizens. Some nursing homes and senior centers like the Robert Mapplethorpe Facility and St. Mary’s Episcopal Center in Manhattan exclusively treat HIV/AIDS seniors.
