The AIDS Beacon™

The prognosis, or prospect of recovery, for HIV-positive and AIDS patients has improved tremendously over the past 20 years, but still depends on multiple factors. The most important include the patient’s access to HIV specialists and proper drug treatments.

At this time, there is still no cure for AIDS, but combinations of various drugs can slow down the virus’s progress, often allowing patients to live longer, healthier lives. The time to develop AIDS after HIV infection depends on the individual’s health status, behaviors, and how soon he or she seeks treatment. In most cases, treating HIV infections or AIDS as early as possible is the best way to improve prognosis.

Anti-retroviral drugs, or drugs that treat retroviruses like HIV, are most effective in enhancing the overall health of HIV-positive and AIDS patients (See “Treatment Overview“).

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the average time to develop AIDS was 10 years, and patients generally did not survive long after developing the disease. Today, with the help of anti-retroviral drug therapies, AIDS patients on average, can expect to live 13 years longer, and HIV-positive patients show much slower development of AIDS. According to a study in the medical journal Lancet, researchers found that the life expectancy of a 20-year-old HIV patient receiving combination therapy averages at around 50 years.

Doctors who specialize in the treatment of  HIV/AIDS find that Highly Active Anti-retroviral Therapy (HAART) dramatically improves patients’ prognoses. When a patient uses HAART, he or she takes three or four different anti-retroviral drugs in combination. Starting HAART before the level of CD4 cells (”helper T-cells”) falls below 200 per milliliter of blood, or soon after showing the first signs of HIV infection, is more likely to slow the virus’s effects on the immune system.

Like other medical treatments, every user reacts differently to anti-retroviral drugs, and all patients should consider the possibility of negative side-effects from each drug. Doctors also warn patients that in some cases, HIV may develop resistance to the drugs in treatment plans.

HIV/AIDS specialists give patients advice about whether they should start HAART based on the costs and benefits unique to that specific patient. Each patient’s prognosis depends on his or her reaction to the drugs and the extent to which the virus has established itself in the immune system. Many symptoms of AIDS are actually caused by opportunistic infections, which would not occur in an individual with a healthy immune system, and treatment for those infections is usually successful.

On the other hand, research on patients considering HAART shows that individuals with the following conditions have a poorer prognosis:

• CD4 counts below 200 cells per milliliter of blood
• Viral loads,or the amounts of the virus in one milliliter of blood, above 100,000 copies per milliliter of blood
• Patients over 50 years old
• Patients who are injecting drug users
• Patients with a prior AIDS defining illness, or infections more common in AIDS patients.

The above factors negatively affect a patient’s chances of becoming seriously ill or dying.