Coping skills can boost HIV survival, study shows

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 04/10/07

BY MARILYN ELIAS
USA TODAY

HIV patients live longer if they face stress by venting their feelings, taking a realistic view of threats to their health and keeping a sense of self-worth, a study suggested.

The findings add to growing evidence that how HIV-positive patients cope with their trauma can affect how rapidly the disease progresses. The study on 174 men and women was reported at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting recently in Budapest, Hungary.

Participants were asked at the start to write an essay describing their emotional responses to a traumatic life event. Most wrote about HIV problems. Their blood was drawn to measure virus-fighting CD-4 cells and viral load; CD-4 cells decline and viral load increases as HIV progresses. Then blood was redrawn every six months for four years.

Researchers who didn't know the patients' blood results analyzed their essays for four qualities:

Realism: Not exaggerating or minimizing the health threat.

Good self-esteem: Patients finding positive qualities in themselves.

Approaching problems head-on: Not ignoring HIV-related troubles or running away through drug or alcohol use.

Emotional venting: Not feeling too paralyzed to express emotions.

Researchers took into account patients' disease stage, medications, education and other things that could affect HIV progression, says psychologist Conall O'Cleirigh of Harvard University School of Medicine. He reported on the study with co-author Gail Ironson of University of Miami.

Patients who handled stress in emotionally healthy ways did better at fending off HIV, O'Cleirigh says. The better their coping methods at the start, the slower their decline of virus-fighting cells and the less HIV in their blood, he says.

Patients who aren't into avoidance or are not paralyzed by stress may be more likely to find a good doctor and take their medicines, O'Cleirigh says. So that could improve the prognosis.