New research into HIV/AIDS therapy has found that starting treatment with drugs for the AIDS virus may be better sooner than later as victims are more than 70% less likely to die when they started taking cocktails of HIV drugs earlier than currently recommended.
While there is at present no cure for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, combinations of drugs are able to stop the virus from replicating and damaging the immune system.
In the past it has been unclear when is the best time for patients to begin to take the drug combo regimen and it is common practice for doctors wait for some evidence to appear of damage, by counting the number of immune cells called CD4 T-cells - when patients have fewer than 350 CD4 cells per milliliter of blood, current guidelines advise highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART, should commence.
These powerful drug combinations which been available since the mid-1990s have transformed HIV infection from a virtual death sentence to a manageable chronic condition but they do have side-effects including heart and cholesterol problems, diarrhea, nausea and other side effects, which is why treatment was delayed - they also must be taken religiously or resistance develops and the drugs stop working.
The researchers from the U.S. and Canada examined information in International Epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS, a global network of HIV clinics from 1996 to 2006 and compared the records of 8,374 healthy HIV patients with CD4 counts of 351 to 500 who had never taken HAART.
The researchers led by Dr. Mari Kitahata of the University of Washington in Seattle found that during the period studied, 30% of the patients started HAART while the others waited until their CD4 counts fell below 350 and those who waited were 71% more likely to die of something than those who took the drugs early.
Other recently released research has found that patients infected with HIV who interrupt their HAART therapy are more likely to die of heart attacks, strokes and other deadly blood clots.