Disease Information

Infectious Diseases: Pediatric HIV / AIDS

Alternate Names: Human immunodeficiency virus; acquired immune deficiency syndrome

Definition

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which attacks the body’s immune system. This assault makes the infected person susceptible to opportunistic infections normally fought off by a healthy immune system. HIV is spread through blood and certain other bodily fluids. About 90 percent of children with HIV are infected through their HIV-positive mothers, either before or during birth.

Incidence

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports more than 9,000 cases of AIDS in children (diagnosed before age 13) in the United States.  There are many more children living with HIV who have not developed AIDS.
  
• Since 1999, the estimated annual incidence of AIDS among women has increased 15 percent.  Most of these women are of childbearing age, and many more have HIV infection but have not yet developed AIDS.
  
• The CDC estimates that about 10 to 25 percent of all infants born to HIV-positive mothers will be infected with the virus if no preventive therapy is given. Effective anti-viral therapy given to the mother during pregnancy and labor and to the child can reduce transmission to 5 to 8 percent or even less.
  
• New information suggests that adolescents are at greatest risk to acquire new infection with HIV related to risky behaviors. Up to 50 percent of new cases occur in youth and young adults between 13 and 24 years of age.

Survival Rates

Currently there is no cure for HIV / AIDS. With new therapies, however, HIV has become a chronic disease, and infected persons are living many years. This increased survival rate requires life-long medication.

Current Research

The best hope for treating HIV / AIDS may be finding the right combination of drugs to stop the mother-to-infant transmission of the virus and inhibit the replication of HIV within an infected person’s body. Discovery of new medications and the best way to administer them with the fewest side effects is a major goal of our researchers.

• St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is part of the AIDS Clinical Trial Group, a cooperative network funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. An AIDS Clinical Trials Unit has been established at St. Jude to serve children and pregnant mothers in the Mid-South who otherwise would not have access to clinical trials and investigational drugs.
  
• We are learning new information about the long-term effects of the disease as well as the medications used to treat it. We are studying growth and development, changes in lipid metabolism, changes in bone development, and psychosocial aspects of living with HIV in children and adolescents.
  

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