[Specific causes of death among 381 AIDS patients who died in hospitals]

In this study, researchers investigated the demographic and clinical characteristics of AIDS patients who died in hospitals, analyzed the specific causes of death, and looked for the correlation between specific cause of death and their clinical characteristics.

Data of clinical characteristics of patients and their specific causes AIDS of death who died in the seven hospitals from 2009 to 2010 were collected retrospectively. All the specific causes of death were classified according to the Cause of Death (CoDe) project protocol. Univariate analysis and multivariate logistic regression analysis were used to find the association between some categorical variables and the risk for AIDS patients died from AIDS related illnesses.

Clinical characteristics and the cause of death of the 381 deceased in seven hospitals in this study were collected. 82.4% were male, with priority as 30-45 years old. 123 (32.3%) death patients had received ART before death. In all death cases, the cause of death of 252 patients (66.1%) were due to AIDS related diseases, with opportunistic infections the most (92.4%). Tubercle bacillus, infection of Penicillium marneffei and Pneumocystis jiroveci were the three leading causes of opportunistic infection deaths. Of 129 patients who died of non-AIDS related disease, non-AIDS infection (29.5%), hepatitis (22.5%), and non-AIDS malignancy(10.1%)were the first three causes of death. The cause of death in patients who had injecting drug use behavior within one year, had not received ART or not long enough, with opportunistic infections, without hepatitis, with the last low CD4 cell counts before death etc. were tend to due to AIDS related disease.

Opportunistic infections, non-AIDS related infections and hepatitis were the three leading causes of death in this study. The duration of time on ART had impact on the patient's cause of death. The HIV infected patients who had received ART before death had more risk to die of non-AIDS related disease, compared to patients who had not. The longer time they had accessed to ART, the less likely they would die on non-AIDS related illnesses.