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Antiretroviral Drugs For HIV/AIDS Treatment

Acquired Immune Deficiency syndrome or AIDS is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus. The late stage of the condition leaves individuals prone to opportunistic infections and tumors. Although treatments for AIDS and HIV exist to slow the virus's progression, but, there is no known cure.

There is currently no vaccine or cure for HIV or AIDS. The only known method of prevention are based on avoiding exposure to the virus or failing that an antiretroviral treatment directly after a highly significant exposure, called post-exposure prophylaxis.

Well current treatment for HIV infection consists of highly active antiretroviral therapy, also known as HAART. This has been highly beneficial to many HIV-infected individuals since its introduction in 1996. Current optimal HAART options consist of combinations consisting of at least three drugs belonging to at least two types, or "classes," of anti-retroviral agents. Typical regimens consist of two nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors plus either a protease inhibitor or a non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor.

HAART allows the stabilization of the patient’s symptoms and viremia, but it neither cures the patient of HIV, nor alleviates the symptoms, and high levels of HIV-1, often HAART resistant, return once treatment is stopped. Moreover, it would take more than the lifetime of an individual to be cleared of HIV infection using HAART. Despite this, many HIV-infected individuals have experienced remarkable improvements in their general health and quality of life, which has led to the plummeting of HIV-associated morbidity and mortality.

In the absence of HAART, progression from HIV infection to AIDS occurs at a median of between nine to ten years and the median survival time after developing AIDS is only 9.2 months. HAART is thought to increase survival time by between 4 and 12 years. This average reflects the fact that for some patients and in many clinical cohorts this may be more than fifty percent of patients HAART achieves far less than optimal results. This is due to a variety of reasons such as medication intolerance/side effects, prior ineffective antiretroviral therapy and infection with a drug-resistant strain of HIV.

However, non-adherence and non-persistence with antiretroviral therapy is the major reason most individuals fail to get any benefit from and develop resistance to HAART. The reasons for non-adherence and non-persistence with HAART are varied and overlapping. Major psychosocial issues, such as poor access to medical care, inadequate social supports, psychiatric disease and drug abuse contribute to non-adherence. The complexity of these HAART regimens, whether due to pill number, dosing frequency, meal restrictions or other issues along with side effects that create intentional non-adherence also has a weighty impact. The side effects include lipodystrophy, dyslipidaemia, insulin resistance, an increase in cardiovascular risks and birth defects.

Thus, it becomes clear that despite the widespread use of complementary and alternative medicine by people living with HIV/AIDS, the effectiveness of the therapy has not been established yet.

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Article Source: Free Content Articles Directory

Author Vikas Lov is associated with Aids Articles, we should always take care of Aids Prevention.

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