HIV Treatment and HIV Medications

Immune therapies are treatments which influence or modify certain components of the immune system. besides drugs a number of therapies are being looked into for use by people with HIV by boosting the body’s immunity.

How AIDS Drugs are combined and the order in which they are given are important factors to consider when designing treatment strategies for patients new to antiretroviral therapy, says a new study funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health. When HIV-infected individuals begin treatment with a combination of the drugs zidovudine, better known as AZT, lamivudine and efavirenz, the drugs retain their effectiveness for a longer period of time than when individuals begin treatment with one of several other three-drug regimens. haart utilizes multiple combinations of HIV drugs to stop the virus from progressing. The goal of HAART is to combine three or more drugs from one or more different classes of anti-HIV drugs to suppress HIV replication and prevent progression to AIDS and death. Two key classes include those that prevent the virus from copying itself, called reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors, and those that prevent the virus from becoming infectious, called protease inhibitors. RT inhibitors can be further broken down into nucleoside RT inhibitors, which halt HIV replication by making faulty DNA building blocks, and non-nucleoside inhibitors, which bind to the enzyme reverse transcriptase to prevent the virus from copying itself. The effacacy of HIV drug combinations can decrease over time and doctors have to often implement new combinations. Combination AIDS/HIV regimens are our currently most effective method in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Using this regimens we have been able to prolong lives, improve quality of life and even slow the transmission of HIV/AIDS.