Aaron Chan
Medical Student
About Aaron: Aaron is a medical student at the University of British Columbia. While working with the EMBARC group, he learned about clinical research, statistical methods, and some of the challenges faced by people living with HIV.
Aaron’s FLEX project, completed as part of his first year of medical school, is a literature review on the effect of polypharmacy in people living with HIV. Polypharmacy is the co-prescription of at least five medications and is believed to increase the risk of adverse side effects within the individual in addition to tasking organ systems that metabolize these drugs, including the liver and kidneys. This review investigated the current evidence on polypharmacy and the mechanisms that potentially explain how it increases morbidity and mortality in this population.