A Dutch study presented at the 20^th European AIDS Conference (EACS 2025) in Paris compared the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in around 500 older people with HIV with the same number of carefully matched people without HIV for the last decade.

It found that although the people with HIV reported consistently lower quality of life as measured by a 36-point questionnaire, the difference was very slight and unlikely to be of clinical significance. There was also no decline seen in HRQoL in participants, regardless of HIV status, between their first assessment and their last, eight years later. (On average, they aged from 52-53 to 60-61 during that time.)

However, study participants also completed a questionnaire that asked about symptoms of depression. This found significantly more experience of depression among the HIV-positive participants than the HIV-negative ones, to the extent that the positive ones significantly exceeded the threshold score that would suggest clinical depression (16 points out of a maximum of 60). The HIV-negative participants did not.