- Fewer cases and more infections
- Goals of HIV treatment
- Breakthrough in HIV treatment
- Less drugs inHIV therapy
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The development in HIV treatment in recent years has brought spectacular results. The sick live longer, start families, and their overall life expectancy is no different than that of the rest of society. HIV has become a chronic disease. New methods of therapy have also emerged that allow HIV-positive people to reduce the amount of medications they take.
Fewer cases and more infections
In the European Union countries, the number of new HIV infections in the last eleven years has decreased by 17%, but it continues to increase throughout Europe. At the same time, thanks to universal access to tests and effective antiretroviral therapy (ARV) at every stage of infection, the number of AIDS cases has decreased by over 40%. The number of deaths of people suffering from HIV and AIDS has decreased accordingly.
Goals of HIV treatment
One of the main goals of HIV treatment is to reduce and keep the viral load at an undetectable level (undetectable-non-infectious / N=N) and to increase the quality of life for patients.
Thanks to the development of medicine, it has become possible and the life expectancy of HIV-positive people has been significantly extended and with early detection and treatment it does not differ from the rest of the population.
Breakthrough in HIV treatment
With age, the needs of HIV patients change, including those not directly related to infection, but to aging. People over fifty years of age begin to develop other diseases, which increases the amount of medications taken - the three-component antiretroviral therapy begins to include, for example, measures for hypertension.
According to the Positive Perspectives study, 82% of people living with HIV take at least one drug in addition to ARV. Thus, the possibility of side effects increases.
As many as 57% of HIV-positive people are worried about taking such large amounts of drugs, and 3/4 of the respondents want to use less of them for HIV, if it stops viremia as effectively.
This is especially important for patients because non-infectious=undetectable, which means that an HIV-positive person with less than 200 copies of the virus per 1 ml of blood cannot infect another person, also during intercourse. Science meets them.
Less drugs inHIV therapy
According to the latest research by ViiV He althcare and GSK, in people with HIV who have not received treatment before, two-component antiretroviral therapy is as effective and has long-lasting effects as the three-component therapy introduced so far.
Data on the use of fewer antiretroviral drugs in HIV three-drug users and suppressed HIV patients also support the effectiveness of this therapy. This means that treatment options for HIV-positive people are still expanding and it is possible that a similar breakthrough in therapy will soon take place.
Solutions are already being developed that make it possible to reduce the annual number of doses from 365 to twelve or even six.
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