Compared with the general population, people with HIV may be more likely to develop diabetes and to do so at a younger age, even if they are not obese, MedPage Today reports.

Publishing their findings in BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care, researchers studied nationally representative data concerning 2009 to 2010 from two data sets, including 8,610 people with HIV in the Medical Monitoring Project and 5,604 HIV-negative participants in the annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Among the HIV-positive individuals, about one in four were obese, one in five had hepatitis C virus (HCV) and 90 percent had received antiretrovirals (ARVs) to treat HIV within the previous year. Thirty-six percent of the HIV-negative individuals were obese and just under 2 percent had hep C.

One in 10 of the HIV-positive individuals had diabetes. Of this group, 4 percent had type 1 diabetes, 52 percent had type 2 and 44 percent had an unspecified type of the disease.

Just over 8 percent of the HIV-negative individuals had diabetes.

The researchers found that among the HIV-positive individuals, factors associated with higher risk of diabetes included being older, being obese, living with diagnosed HIV for longer and having a lower CD4 count.

After adjusting the data for those factors as well as sex, ethnicity, HCV infection and poverty, the investigators found that diabetes prevalence was 3.8 percent higher among the HIV-positive group compared with the HIV-negative individuals. Compared with that of the general population, the diabetes prevalence for the HIV-positive group was 5 percent higher in women, 4.1 percent higher in those 20 to 44 years old and 3.5 percent higher in those who were not obese.

The study was not structured to permit strong conclusions about whether there is a cause and effect between having HIV and developing diabetes.

To read the MedPage Today article, click here.

To read the study, click here. 

To read a press release about the study, click here.