Systematic Review: HIV, Aging, and Housing—A North American Perspective, 2012–2023

Abstract

Advances in anti-retroviral therapy (ART) have decreased mortality rates and subsequently led to a rise in the number of HIV-positive people living longer. The housing experiences of this new population of interest—older adults (50 years and older) living with HIV—are under-researched. Understanding the housing experiences and unmet needs of older people with HIV can better provide comprehensive care services for them. This study’s systematic review evaluated the peer-reviewed literature reporting housing access/insecurity/assistance/options, housing impact, and unmet needs of older individuals living with HIV in North America from 2012 to 2023. Furthermore, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a text-mining technique, and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for text clustering were utilized to examine unstructured data from the abstracts selected from the review. The goal was to allow for a better understanding of the relationships between terms in the articles and the identification of emerging public health key themes affecting older adults living with HIV. The results of text clustering yielded two clusters focusing on (1) improvements to housing and healthcare services access and policies and (2) unmet needs—social support, mental health, finance, food, and sexuality insecurities. Topic modeling demonstrated four topics, which we themed to represent (1) a holistic care approach; (2) insecurities—food, financial, sexuality, and other basic needs; (3) access to housing and treatment/care; and (4) homelessness and HIV-related health outcomes. Stable housing, food, and healthcare services access and availability are critical elements to incorporating comprehensive, holistic healthcare for older adults living with HIV. The aging population requires high-priority policies for accessible and equitable healthcare. Clinicians and policymakers should address individual barriers, adopt a patient-centered approach, increase doctor visits, provide competency training, ensure long-term follow-up, involve families, and improve patient education in care management, contributing to HIV/AIDS geriatric care models.