About AIDS

HIV Treatment Works -- 20 Years or More!

How long will the anti-HIV treatment last? Will it enable an HIV-infected person to survive a normal lifetime? The answer isn't concretely known and depends on how well the poz patient sticks with taking the pills. However, a new study announced in AIDS, the journal of the International AIDS Society, suggests that treatment can be effective for 20 years or longer.

The referenced study followed 233 patients (a respectably large sample) for up to four years; each person had achieved a viral load of 50 or less per milliliter of blood. Therefore, all these patients had experienced at least initial success with their treatment, and they were pretty good about adherence.

The researchers tracked the patients' treatment failure or viral breakthrough, i.e., how fast or how often the virus found its way around the drugs then being taken and began to multiply again, resulting in a higher viral load, such that the patient had to switch to another drug combination.

Projecting four years' experience onto a longer time frame, the researchers concluded that the average (median) treatment success would be about 20 years (half would exceed that time). "If initial viral suppression is achieved and adherence to therapy can be maintained, the chance of treatment failure is extremely low," they concluded.

Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy, or HAART (aka "the drug cocktail"), obviously works to manage HIV disease. The even better news is that pharmaceutical research is consistently developing more-effective drugs -- stronger against HIV, with fewer pills to take, and with lessened side effects. Still, the hard part: The key to success is treatment adherence, sticking with it, every pill on time, every day.

Bottom line: People who have engaged in risky behavior should get tested for HIV and, if infected, get into care. Someday, that will include taking HAART, and that won't exactly be fun. HAART is not a cure, but it works! HIV infection does not have to equal suffering and death.

(For details, see the journal AIDS 17(5): 768-770; March 2003. F. Lampe, M. Johnson, et al.)