Subjective memory complaints are associated with poorer cognitive performance in adults with HIV

ABSTRACT

With successful antiretroviral therapy in the US, HIV-positive adults now routinely survive into old age. However, increased life expectancy with HIV introduces the added complication of age-related cognitive decline. Aging with HIV has been associated with poorer cognitive outcomes compared to HIV-negative adults. While up to 50% of older HIV-positive adults will develop some degree of cognitive impairment over their lifetime, cognitive symptoms are often not consistently monitored, until those symptoms are significant enough to impair daily life. In this study we found that subjective memory complaint (SMC) ratings correlated with measurable memory performance impairments in HIV-positive adults, but not HIV-negative adults. As the HIV-positive population ages, structured subjective cognitive assessment may be beneficial to identify the early signs of cognitive impairment, and subsequently allow for earlier interventions to maintain cognitive performance as these adults continue to survive into old age.

KEYWORDS:

• HIV-1
• aging
• memory
• cognition
• subjective memory impairment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Asante Kamkwalala http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4001-0698

Todd Hulgan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3339-067X

Paul Newhouse http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9298-7185

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, under CTSA Award No. UL1TR000445. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent official views of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences or the National Institutes of Health. This work was also supported by the National Institutes of Health, under The National Aging Institute grant #1R01 AG047992-01A1 (P. N.). The paper was additionally supported in part by the NIH-funded Tennessee Center for AIDS Research (P30 AI110527).