Source: China Daily
04-17-2009 14:17
Special Report: Tech MaxBritish doctors are calling for HIV-infected patients to receive earlier treatment than is presently the norm.
Researchers have just published evidence that they say makes it imperative for patients to be treated before their immune systems crash below a commonly recognized threshold of damage inflicted by the AIDS virus.
Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) began to overturn the automatic death sentence associated with AIDS after this powerful cocktail of drugs was introduced in 1996.
But the big question remained: When to start giving it to someone infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)?
Physicians have to balance the benefits of restoring immune defenses against the risk of the treatment's side effects, which can be toxic.
There is no universal guideline for when HAART should begin but a common recommendation is to start when there are fewer than 200-250 CD4 cells - key immune cells that are attacked by the virus - per microliter of blood.
Researchers now say this threshold is too low and that lives can be saved if HAART starts sooner, although supportive evidence is sketchy.
In a paper published in The Lancet, a team led by Jonathan Sterne of Britain's University of Bristol compared studies that followed more than 45,000 HIV-infected people in Europe and North America before and after the HAART era.
