Sleep Quality and Frailty Among People Living With HIV

With effective antiretroviral therapy (ART), people living with HIV (PLWH) are living longer and are increasingly experiencing aging-related conditions such as frailty and sleep problems. However, most frailty research has focused on the general older population, and little is known about how sleep relates to physical and oral frailty in PLWH. This case-control study compares sleep disturbance, physical frailty, and oral hypofunction between adults living with HIV receiving ART and sex-matched HIV-negative pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) users recruited from an infectious disease outpatient clinic at a medical center in southern Taiwan. The study also examines whether sleep disturbance (insomnia severity and daytime sleepiness) is associated with physical frailty and oral hypofunction, whether physical frailty represents an indirect pathway between sleep disturbance and oral hypofunction, and the roles of ART and serum Galectin-3 levels in predicting frailty among PLWH.