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WEDNESDAY, June 18 (HealthDay News) -- While older adults may seem the least likely group of Americans to become infected with HIV, a new study suggests it would be cost-effective for doctors to routinely give AIDS tests to some sexually active people in their 60s and 70s.

In fact, an HIV diagnosis and subsequent treatment could potentially add an average of six to nine months to an older person's life, said study co-author Dr. Douglas K. Owens.

"Just because you have someone who's older doesn't mean you shouldn't think about HIV and HIV screening," said Owens, a senior investigator at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in California and professor of medicine at Stanford University.

Older Americans have been largely overlooked throughout the years of the AIDS epidemic, although they are hardly immune. The federal government only recommends routine HIV testing up until the age of 64.

Still, an estimated 20 percent of HIV patients are older than 50, Owens said. And research with older veterans has suggested that as many as one in 200 is infected with the virus that causes AIDS, he said.

The AIDS threat facing older Americans is often ignored, because "people find it difficult to imagine their parents and grandparents being sexually active," said Rowena Johnston, vice president of research with the Foundation for AIDS Research.

For the new study, published in the June 17 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, Owens and his colleagues created a mathematical formula to determine the costs and benefits of routinely testing people aged 55 to 75.

The researchers found that it's cost-effective to test people in that age group if the prevalence of undiagnosed HIV infection is greater than 1 in 1,000 and those being tested have sexual partners at risk of infection.

They reported it may cost $30,000 in tests to lengthen a sexually active 65-year-old person's life by something known as a "quality-adjusted life year," a complicated measurement that takes into account the difficulty of life during illness. On average, diagnosing a 65-year-old with HIV instead of allowing him to remain untreated could lengthen his life by six to nine months, Owens said.

"That's actually a lot. That's a pretty big change," he said. "Many of the interventions we do change life expectancy by a week, a few weeks, maybe a month."

AIDS tests typically cost from $10 to $70, Owens said.

Johnston said doctors with older patients "should to be aware they may be carrying their own biases. It's worth taking into account the person's sexual history and whether they have risk factors."

Still, some observers may question the study's assumption that more than one in 1,000 older adults have HIV and are undiagnosed, said Frank Myers, director of clinical epidemiology and safety systems at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego.

"This study, with its assumptions of HIV prevalence, will not be enough to change HIV screening recommendations by itself," Myers said. But, he added, he hopes the research will motivate health-care providers to ask patients about HIV risk factors and target them with messages about prevention.

More information

For more about older adults and AIDS, visit the Foundation for AIDS Research  .

THURSDAY, June 12 (HealthDay News) -- A new study suggests that older men with abnormal sleeping patterns may face a higher risk of death.

The findings aren't conclusive, and they don't indicate why unusual sleep patterns could be unhealthy. Still, they're food for thought, especially for older men, said study author Misti Paudel.

"If people think they have disruptions in their sleep, they really do need to see their physician and try to find potential causes or treatment options," said Paudel, a sleep researcher at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in Minneapolis.

The study, the first of its kind, sought to determine whether sleep patterns in older men had anything to do with their mortality rates, Paudel said.

She and her colleagues recruited 3,053 men aged 67 and older. They told the men to wear wrist actigraphs, wristwatch-like devices that measure body movement and allow researchers to analyze when people are awake or sleeping.

The participants wore the devices for up to 13 nights. "Over the course of a few days, we can see the activity patterns and compare them with other men in the group, start to look at what's normal and not normal," Paudel explained.

The researchers then followed the participants for about six years, checking to see if and when they died.

The researchers released the findings Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, in Baltimore.

"What we found was that men who had [sleeping patterns] that were shifted either earlier or later in the day had an increased risk of mortality," Paudel said.

Even after researchers adjusted their findings to lessen the effect of factors like poor health, race and alcohol use, the differences in mortality rates remained. The men who hit their peaks of activity at the earliest and latest times of day were 80 percent more likely to die than the others, Paudel said.

The researchers didn't calculate how many years earlier the subjects died if they had abnormal sleeping patterns. The study also doesn't make it clear if night owls or early birds are at risk, although that could explain why some of the men were active at early or late times of day, Paudel said.

Why would abnormal sleep patterns make death more likely? "We don't really know how this is related to mortality," Paudel said. "It could be that there is some other medical condition that wasn't accounted for."

Sleep researcher Dr. Daniel Kripke said early or late sleep patterns may disrupt the body's metabolism or reflect cases of Alzheimer's disease. It's also possible that unusual sleep patterns could reflect problems in the body's genes, said Kripke, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, who plans to collaborate on future research with one of the study's authors.

Kripke isn't ready to advise older men to adjust their sleep patterns. "As yet, there is no evidence in this type of person that changing a person's hours would improve survival," he said. "It means it is not a bad idea to have normal hours, but we cannot yet say that not having them is a willful mistake."

More information

Learn more about sleep from the National Sleep Foundation  .

WEDNESDAY, June 11 (HealthDay News) -- Adding monthly injections of golimumab to weekly doses of methotrexate helped most people with rheumatoid arthritis, even putting some into remission, two new studies show.

The findings on golimumab, an anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha biologic therapy drug, were scheduled to be presented Tuesday at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress of Rheumatology, in Paris.

In the first study, one group of patients taking methotrexate weekly for active rheumatoid arthritis were given either 50-milligram or 100-milligram doses of golimumab via subcutaneous injections, while the rest of the patients received a placebo and methotrexate.

After just 14 weeks, 35 percent of those receiving 50-milligram doses of golimumab and 32 percent of patients in the 100-milligram group achieved remission as measured by Disease Activity Score. Only 13 percent in the placebo group reached remission. These improvements were sustained for six months.

More than two-thirds of the golimumab patients increased their ability to perform routine activities such as arising, dressing, eating, walking, hygiene, reaching and gripping after 24 weeks on the additional drug. Some of the improvements were noticeable after four weeks of the first golimumab injection, and the golimumab patients generally continued to improve over the duration of the study.

Only 39 percent of those in the placebo group showed similar improvement after 24 weeks.

"The data in this study demonstrate that golimumab is beneficial in improving numerous disease parameters, including inducing remission, in patients whose disease was active despite ongoing treatment with methotrexate," lead investigator Dr. Edward Keystone, director of the Rebecca MacDonald Centre for Arthritis and Autoimmune Disease at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, said in prepared statement. "Since some patients do not respond adequately to methotrexate alone, this combination therapy could prove to be a highly valuable treatment option based on these results."

In the second study, rheumatoid arthritis patients who had never taken methotrexate were treated with that drug and either 50 milligrams or 100 milligrams of golimumab. These patients also experienced a lessening of the signs and symptoms of arthritis as well as in disease activity, with 38 percent of those receiving the two drugs experiencing a 50 percent drop in signs and symptoms of RA after 24 weeks. Just 29 percent of those receiving a placebo plus methotrexate experienced a similar improvement in their condition.

Thirty-eight percent of patients receiving golimumab meet the remission standard after 24 weeks.

"These data show that treatment with golimumab induces an important depth of response, improving multiple aspects of rheumatoid arthritis and leading to significant decreases in disease activity," study investigator Dr. Roy Fleischmann, chief of the rheumatology division at St. Paul University Hospital in Dallas, said in a prepared statement. "Golimumab is a promising treatment option for multiple patient populations with this chronic and potentially debilitating inflammatory disease."

More information

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more about rheumatoid arthritis.

(HealthDay News) -- Caring for a person with Alzheimer's disease often includes helping with all daily activities, including eating.

Here are suggestions to help make mealtime easier, courtesy of the Alzheimer's Association:

• Set aside at least an hour for each meal. Don't rush the person through it.
• Make sure the person is seated comfortably, but upright. Keep the person sitting upright for at least 30 minutes after eating.
• Prepare soft foods that are easy to chew and swallow. Eating may become very difficult, so food may need to be mashed or pureed.
• To reduce the risk of choking, thicken drinks with gelatin or cornstarch.
• Understand that a person may be more prone to choking as Alzheimer's progresses. Get training on using the Heimlich maneuver.
• Since significant weight loss could be a sign of malnutrition, contact a doctor to have weight loss evaluated.