Washington (ECN) - According to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, people are living longer with HIV.

By the year 2004, patients who were infected with HIV were not any more likely to die in the first five years of their diagnosis as those who did not have HIV.

This shows that people who are living with HIV are living longer and healthire lives, thanks to new drugs which help with treatment.

This is the first study to compare rates of HIV deaths to mortality rates in the general population, looking at patients between 1981 and 2006.

What they found was that over the years, the risk of death for those infected with HIV has dropped considerably.

This continued up until the most recent year, where it was found that someone with HIV within their first five years experienced no increased risk of death compared to someone without HIV.