AIDS
Cognitive Impairment May Be Specifically Increased in Older HIV Positive Individuals. A longitudinal study seeks to understand how aging affects the cognitive and motor disorders due to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection—minor cognitive-motor disorder and HIV-1 associated dementia. Researchers used a battery of standardized tests to measure performance in learning and memory, language abilities, visuospatial processing, the speed of processing information, problem solving abilities, and fine eye-hand motor coordination. Older HIV-positive individuals tended to perform significantly less well than their younger HIV-positive counterparts on measures of verbal memory and the speed of visual scanning and discrimination, while these differences were not observed when younger and older HIV-negative individuals were tested. Older HIV-positive individuals also have a greater number of the symptoms of this minor cognitive-motor disorder than their younger HIV-positive counterparts. The investigators conclude that older HIV-positive individuals are more likely to have clinically diagnosed cognitive and motor disorders.