Live For Another 13 Years with New HIV Drugs

During the course of searching for a cure for HIVdefine, Rochelle Walensky, M.D., M.P.H., Kenneth Freedberg, M.D., M.Sc., and their colleagues become conscious of the fact that the betterment in the treatment of HIV using the new generation drugs has led to a survival benefit of millions of years and also disallowed 2,900 mother to child infection cases.

This means another million plus years of life. In short, any HIVdefine infected person who has been treating himself with the current advances in medicine (highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) since the last five years will live for 13.3 years more than a person who was under treatment 20 years ago.

The papers presented by Drs. Walensky and Freedberg are available online and the calculations of life span projected in them clearly draw attention to the triumphs and disappointments of HIV/AIDS treatment over the last few years.

In their research, Dr. Freedberg and colleagues incorporated literature-based data of clinical measures including HIV viral load, CD4+ T-cell counts, efficacy of HAART, and incidence of opportunistic infections, to replicate HIV disease evolution both with and without treatment.

The research has been a very costly affair, but the three million extra years of life it has contributed, makes every penny spent worth it.

The results could have been even better had there been more awareness about the disease and if the drugs had been more easily available. Shocking but true, currently millions of people don’t even know that they are HIV positivedefine.

However, the new rapid HIV test distribution program formulated by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could help in changing these figures. The new tests carried out by CDC are single day tests as compared to the early tests which took a fortnight to give the results. 1.2 % cases of infection have already been traced between the years 2003-2005 using these tests.

According to the co authors of the study, all the figures presented in the study which include cases of infection and survival years are a very conservative estimate. The actual results would be much more on the optimistic side.

Visualize the effect of this study on society. It would result in so many less children getting orphaned. It would not leave so many families in the lurch just because their bread winners became victims of this disease.

These new treatments have a flip side to them also. They can not claim to stop the symptoms of AIDS altogether forever. Quite a few patients develop resistance to these medicines. Other side effects include high cholesterol and heart strokes.

HIV, the horror disease which pronounced a death sentence and did not have a treatment a decade ago is curable today with the best of drugs and the finest part is that the patient can lead quite close to normal a life with a greater life expectancy.