‘Cocaine hippos,’ faster aging with HIV and the hidden dangers of inflammation

April 20, 2026

Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm

‘Cocaine hippos,’ faster aging with HIV and the hidden dangers of inflammation

“Cocaine hippos,” underground bees, and fresh insights into aging and heart health

By Rachel Feltman, Andrea Gawrylewski, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura

RAUL ARBOLEDA/Getty Images

SUBSCRIBE TO Science Quickly

Apple | Spotify | YouTube | RSS

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for…

Rachel Feltman: Wait…

Pierre-Louis: Oh hey Rachel!

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Feltman: Oh hey Kendra, thanks so much for filling in but I got this.

For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.

Yes, the rumors are true: I’m back from parental leave and settling back in here at Science Quickly. I’m thrilled to be back in your feed, so let’s dive right into today’s episode.

We’ll start with some health news. As the available treatments for HIV have improved, so have the number of people living into middle and old age with HIV. In the U.S., more than half of people with HIV are now age 50 or older, and 4.2 million people in that cohort are living with HIV worldwide. But while people with HIV can now live longer lives with the help of medication, researchers have noted that they seem to develop age-associated conditions—things like bone density loss, heart and kidney disease, cognitive decline and certain cancers—at an earlier age than their HIV-negative peers. Some studies looking at epigenetic measures of aging, or the changes in your DNA that accumulate over time, suggest that HIV infections can accelerate a person’s biological aging process by several years. While we don’t yet know for sure what factors might intersect to fuel this process, we do know that chronic inflammation is associated with accelerated aging. We also know that HIV causes chronic inflammation, because the immune system is always “turned on” and on high alert due to the presence of the infection.

Today, researchers at the annual meeting of The European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases presented their latest findings on this problem. Their preprint paper suggests antiretroviral therapy, or ART—the standard course of treatment for people with HIV—does work to combat some of the virus’s potential to speed up aging, bringing the average difference between biological and actual, chronological age from 10 years to about 4 after just around a year and a half of treatment.

To come to these findings, the researchers developed a tool called a plasma proteomic ageing clock, or PAC. Using the Swiss HIV Cohort Study, which has followed people living with HIV in Switzerland since 1988, they trained the PAC to analyze 416 different proteins found in the blood and associated with aging. They used the tool on a subset of study subjects who had supplied blood samples for several years after an HIV diagnosis before actually starting ART. When they looked at those subjects they were able to track how biological aging accelerated with infection—and then slowed or even reversed with treatment. In a press release, the study authors called for other researchers to use the tool on more diverse populations to see if the results held up.

Speaking of inflammation and health, an article in Scientific American’s latest print issue dives into how this immune response can also drive heart disease. I’ll let SciAm’s chief newsletter editor Andrea Gawrylewski jump in to tell you more.

Andrea Gawrylewski: Hey, Rachel. Yeah, for decades, cardiologists have really focused on four big risk factors for heart disease, high blood pressure, smoking, high levels of bad LDL cholesterol and type 2 diabetes.

But nearly a quarter of all people who die from heart disease or cardiac illness do not have one of these four risks. So this has really baffled researchers for many years.

Scientists are now starting to pay attention to a new factor that they suspect is contributing to heart disease, and that is chronic inflammation.

Inflammation is the body's built-in alarm system. It activates when the immune system senses it's something untoward happening. For instance, when the body detects a virus or bacteria, it recruits immune cells to the scene, where those cells launch an all-out attack against that bacteria or virus and the cells it infected.

But sometimes this process doesn't cool down or shut off, and instead it starts harming the body's healthy tissues. Such chronic inflammation, as it's called, it t