HEALTH Openly accessible at Smoking behavior of HIV-infected patients

Recent reports describe an increased rate of cardiovascular events in smoking HIV-infected subjects. However, a lot is still unknown about smoking in this patient population. The purpose of the study was to analyze smoking behavior in HIV-infected subjects as a risk factor of coro-nary atherosclerosis and determine its effect on the probability of coronary events. We analyzed the cardiovascular risk factors of 294 HIV-infected adults (age: 42.1 10.1 years; 77 % males). An elevated tobacco abuse was observed in 63.6% of the HIV-infected patients. Tobacco use was much more common in HIV-infected males than in females (67.8 % vs. 49.2%; p < 0.01). Eve