Treatment

Treatment

When AIDS first surfaced in the United States, no drugs were available to combat the underlying immune deficiency and few treatments existed for the opportunistic diseases that resulted. However, during the past 10 years, therapies have been developed to fight both HIV infection and its associated infections and cancers.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a number of drugs for the treatment of HIV infection including:

• Abacavir Succinate

• Nucleoside Analog Reverse Transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs)

• Didanosine (ddI)

• Lamivudine (3TC)

• Stavudine (D4T)

• Zalcitabine (ddC)

• Zidovudine (also known as AZT)

These drugs slow the spread of HIV and delay the onset of opportunistic infections. The drugs do not prevent transmission of HIV to other individuals

Also available for use in combination with other antiretroviral drugs during stages of HIV infection are Non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) such as:

• Delavirdine

• Efavirenz

• Nevirapine

Virus replication is interrupted at a later step by anti-HIV drugs, called protease inhibitors such as:

• Indinavir

• Nelfinavir

• Ritonavir

• Saquinivir

HIV can become resistant to each class of drugs, so a combination treatment using both is necessary to effectively lower the amount of virus in the blood. It appears this cocktail will no longer result in complete eradication of the virus. Persons who have stopped the drug cocktail even after two years of treatment have generally had a rapid return of the virus.