The apparent dangers of smoking are now even more stark for people with HIV. A new study has found that HIV-positive smokers with a well-controlled virus lose far more years off their life expectancy to cigarettes than to HIV. Publishing their findings in Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers in Copenhagen followed nearly 3,000 Danes (excluding injection drug users) in stable HIV care and more than 10,000 HIV-negative people as a control group over a 15-year period in order to estimate the health impact of smoking. HIV-positive smokers were five times more likely to die from non-AIDS related deaths than non-smoking people with HIV, notably cardiovascular disease and cancer, with more than 60 percent of the deaths in the HIV study group linked to smoking. HIV-positive non-smokers lost five years of life compared with their HIV-negative counterparts.  Meanwhile, people with HIV who smoked lost more than 12 years of life compared with those without HIV who never smoked.