Human Services News

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

A newly published study by investigators at the Center for AIDS Research at Case Medical Center, led by Benigno Rodríguez, MD, along with a nationwide team of AIDS/HIV experts, strongly challenges conventional thinking about the role of measurements of the amount of HIV particles in the blood as a method of predicting a patient's ability to fight off the disease.

The study, published in the current issue of JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), indicates that the amount of HIV in a patient's blood (commonly known as the viral load) is much less reliable as a tool for determining the rate at which he or she will lose infection-fighting CD4 cells than previously thought.

"The results of this nationwide study may have profound implications in our understanding of how HIV causes disease and in our approach to the management of HIV-infected patients," says Dr. Rodriguez, infectious disease specialist at the Case Medical Center, a partnership of University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

The investigators sought to estimate how much of the person-to-person variation in the rate of CD4 cell loss could be accounted for on the basis of each patient's initial viral load, in an attempt to reproduce more closely the situation that a physician would encounter in clinical practice, where a patient presents with an initial set of laboratory results and the clinician must try to predict how quickly that person's CD4 cell count will reach the danger level at which treatment for HIV becomes most critical.

Antiretroviral therapy, also known as HAART, is credited with saving millions of lives.

However, potent side effects and issues of drug resistance, often cause doctors and patients to defer starting the medications, until it becomes medically necessary.

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