The low incidence of HIV-linked memory loss in India is due to under-diagnosis and inadequate medical facilities, according to experts. Human immunodeficiency virus causes memory loss or dementia. But the number of such cases reported in India is low and a team of city scientists blames it on under-diagnosis and factors such as social stigma and poor medical care. HIV has strains like HIV-1B and HIV-C. While HIV-1B is prevalent in the USA and Europe, HIV-1C is found in India, China and sub-Saharan Africa. Both the strains cause memory loss.
Scientists from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology claim that HIV-associated dementia (HAD), which is apparently more common and severe in HIV-1B patients than those with HIV-1C, “may also be underreported”. “The low incidence of HAD in HIV-1C may be attributable to under-diagnosis due to social stigma, inadequate medical facilities, ignorance, shorter life expectancy, short survival after HIV infection, discordance in clinical prevalence of various opportunistic infections, lack of enough autopsy reports, various host and genetic factors, and abuse of drugs,” the CCMB team said in their study published in the scientific journal, Nature.
Moreover, successful therapeutic strategies in the United States are more specific for the HIV-1B virus and may not be suitable for HIV-1C patients. HIV-1C infection is now rapidly spreading to Europe and America. Of the 34 million HIV-1 infected people in the world, about 48 per cent suffer from HIV-1C. HIV-1C has caused millions of deaths. According to the UNAIDS, currently there are about 34 million people living with HIV, including 2.7 million cases of new infection and 1.8 million deaths in 2010 alone. The majority of the cases and deaths were in HIV-1C prevalent regions, the CCMB team pointed out.