The Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS) is a longitudinal, observational cohort study of women infected with and at risk for HIV infection in the United States.
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The WIHS is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) with supplemental funding from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Funding is also provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).
WIHS clinical sites are located in and around 6 cities in the US: Bronx, NY; Brooklyn, NY; Washington, DC; Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco, CA; and Chicago, IL. The data management and coordinating center is in Baltimore, MD. Each consortium is headed by a principal investigator, is affiliated with local research institutes to see study participants, and has its own Community Advisory Board.
The study consist of a cohort of HIV positive and HIV negative women being studied over a long term since 1994. This study is now over 13 years old as of 2007. An additional cohort of women were added in 2001 included some women who had taken HAART, the anti-HIV drug regimen. HIV stands for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the retrovirus considered by almost all scientists to be the cause of AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. HAART stands for Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy.
There is some evidence that women with HIV have more frequent conditions (or higher morbidity) of such infectious diseases as yeast infections, pelvic inflammatory disease, and herpes. [1] It is not known, for certain, whether HIV infection causes higher mortality for these diseases, but this may be presumed.