Survival Rate and Mean Interval between HIV Diagnosis and the Emergence of AIDS Clinical Symptoms in Patients Referring to Behavioral Diseases Health Center of Yazd of Iran from January 2003 to March 2017

Introduction: HIV / AIDS has become a major social problem, and despite the major steps taken to control the disease, it remains as the world’s pandemic. In order to achieve the goals outlined in the HIV/AIDS epidemic control, a comprehensive approach that identifies patients with HIV at an early stage is required to integrate patients into a comprehensive and dynamic care system, and provide appropriate and favorable treatment. Objective: The present study aimed to determine the survival rate and mean interval between HIV infection diagnosis and emergence of clinical symptoms of AIDS in patients referring to the Behavioral Diseases Center of Yazd Province (Iran) from January 2003 to March 2017. Materials and Methods: In this descriptive study, 100 patients who referred to the Behavioral Disease Control Center of Yazd province, January 2003 to March 2017, were studied. Necessary information was collected by the researcher using a checklist containing patients’ demographic, clinical, and therapeutic information and their survival status, extracted from the medical records, without recording their names and by maintaining the data confidentiality. Then, descriptive statistics, Chi-Square, T-test, and Kaplan-Meier survival tests were used with a 95% confidence interval (CI) (P-value≤0.05) using SPSS software Ver 23. Results: In this study, the mean interval between HIV infection diagnosis and the first disease indicative of AIDS in men was 2958 ± 271 and in women 2476 ± 397 days, which was significantly associated with age (P = 0.003), indigenousness or non-indigenousness (P=0.004) and disease transmission method (P=0.011), but had no significant relationship with gender (P = 0.654) and educational level (P=0.16). Also, this study showed that the mean survival rate of patients after HIV diagnosis was 4338 ± 189 days: 4304 ± 219 days in men and 4187 ± 327 days in women, which was not significantly different (P = 0.805). Mean survival was associated with age (P=0.891), gender (P=0.805), indigenous (P = 0.192), disease transmission method (P=0.214), and education (P=0.466). Conclusion: The results of this study and similar studies indicated this obvious principle that it is necessary to minimize the interval between the viral infection and diagnosis of the disease to control the disease, improve the quality of life of patients, and reduce years of potential life lost and we should not delay follow up and treatment of the disease until one of the clinical signs of the disease develops.