I just found out that a relative has AIDS. Actually, I don’t know if he has AIDS, or if he’s HIV+, or if there’s really even a difference nowadays.
Anway, I want to find out more about it. I know it’s not the death sentence it was 20 years ago, but beyond that I’m clueless. Google turns up so many pages that I don’t know where to start. Can someone give me some info or point me in the right direction? I’m looking for pretty general info.
In an documentary the other week, a doctor explained that nowadays being HIV+ means having a chronic condition that needs to be carefully maintained but that this gives the person a pretty normal life, probably of pretty normal lifespan.
I think this presumes the person lives in a wealthy part of the world where expensive drugs are an option. For most people with HIV, it’s still a death sentence. But SDMB isn’t much represented in that part of the world.
Even in the wealthy US it seems that people die from AIDS everyday (no cite). Whether they die of AIDS per se, or just complications from having HIV, I don’t know for sure.
I know that the new “cocktail drugs” help slow down the inevitable, but their lives are anything but normal to me. They have to take a multitude of expensive drugs every day, have to avoid getting even minor infections, and have a highly contagious disease that slowly, but inevitably, degrades their immune system. Existence, yes. A normal life? I wouldn’t think so.
I think there have been great strides in the past few years extending the lives of people who are HIV+. Hopefully someone will come along soon with some stats on the average life expectance compared to someone who is HIV-.
Thanks for the replies. Anyone else?
Just thought i’d point out. Remember Magic Johnson? He got HIV in the early 90’s. He’s still hanging around, and its almost like everyone forgot about it. Oh well. Its still interesting.
The view is now that with early diagnosis and Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment (HAART) a person with HIV may never go on to develop AIDS. That’s never, ever, ever.
A high proportion of patients on HAART have normal CD4 counts and indectable viral loads. They’re likely to have normal lifespans, and unless they develop AIDS, normal immune systems.
I remember a lecture from a specialist in infectious diseases who said that given the choice she’d rather have HIV than Hepatitis C any day, because the treament and prognosis of HIV is better and improving every year. Even people with AIDS can live for many, many years with a good quality of life if they have access to the right treatment.
Because the hospital I work in in in a very deprived area, we have a lot of heroin addicts with AIDS, Hep C and Hep B. Even with the worst social problems you could imagine, the ones with HIV/AIDS do pretty well. There are a fair amount of people who have full-blown AIDS, but look better than people in hospital usually do.
The drug regimes are better than they were (there are pills that combine two or three medications in one pill) and the side effects aren’t as bad for the newer drugs. Also, because there are more anti-retroviral drugs, patients have more choices, and if one drug doesn’t suit they can swap to another one.
It all depends on the person, their ability to tolerate the medications, the stage at which they were diagnosed, their genetic susceptibility to the virus and their response to treatment.
Worst case, it’s obviously very bad, best case it’s just something that is controlled by tablets.
It’s important to note that though the antiretroviral drugs can often be very effective in allowing even patients with AIDS to live a normal life, they aren’t foolproof by any means, or a walk in the park to deal with. Here’s a convenient chart for your reference - some medications may require multiple pills be taken per day, and some have nasty side effects. I’ve seen patients who have developed diabetes due to their antiretroviral therapy and now in addition to those pills also have to monitor their blood sugar and inject insulin a couple times a day. Some developed super-high cholesterol and are on medications to keep that under control to reduce the risk of having clogged arteries/a heart attack/need for bypass surgery. Check out the other long-term side effects in the link I gave for things like mitochondrial damage, liver damage, hepatitis, etc. Sometimes the cure can be (almost) as bad as the disease, though admittedly you had to be lucky to hold on for very long once you developed AIDS, before the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy in the (early?) '90s.
Also, a patient may find that his or her viral infection no longer responds to the drug regimen in use and have to switch, facing an entirely new set of side effects, dosing issues, and permanently crossing off one or more of the approximately 20 US FDA-approved medications for use against HIV. This resistance can even be produced by a patient not taking the medications as directed, similar to how doctors tell you to take the entire regimen of antibiotics when you have a bacterial infection - taking too little of the medication will leave the more resistant ones behind, and those will selectively reproduce and take over. Infection with a new strain of HIV can also cause this, which is why safer sex precautions are recommended even between two HIV-positive people. Even if two people are a couple, a mutation in the strain in one of them could be transmitted to the other person, potentially requiring both of them to change their antiretroviral treatment regimens.
I’ve seen patients with AIDS who have been infected since the early '80s or so and are very healthy and active; I’ve also seen people only recently diagnosed who have problems like opportunistic infections infecting the brain. I found out not long ago that one of my favorite patients died of complications from Kaposi’s sarcoma, one of the well-known diseases that patients with AIDS might contract.
Today is World AIDS Day, by the way. Here’s a good resource selection from the National Institute of Health’s website.
BTW, the distinction is that having HIV means you’re infected with the virus. Other than that, you’re pretty much normal health-wise, but of course you can pass the virus on to someone else through the usual methods. Considering that it can take 10 years or more for an adult to progress to having AIDS once infected (2 years in kids born with it), this is why AIDS is so “good at” being passed around. If your T-cell (aka CD-4) count drops below 200 or you have one of a number of diseases called “AIDS-defining conditions” (basically, diseases not common in people without AIDS, though they can be contracted when not HIV-positive) - Kaposi’s sarcoma, tuberculosis, cytomegalovirus, mycobacterium avium, recurrent pneumonia, and others - then you are considered to have progressed to having AIDS.
(IANAD/N, though I do work with patients with AIDS; this is not medical advice, blah blah blah.)
I have a relative who’s lived with HIV for over 15 years. He still lives a pretty enjoyable life but I would say it’s not necessarily the life he would like to be living.
He’s pretty well off financially so it hasn’t been a huge burden for him to get treatment. Many of the medications he takes seem to decrease how many hours a day he can stay awake. That combined with him having several rough spots (he says there were two times he went to the hospital fairly sure he was going to die) has caused him to not be actively employed for at least 12 years or so. And while he doesn’t want financially I think not having an occupation does bother him somewhat. However he keeps active in a large variety of ways.
He’s also in excellent physical shape, runs and lifts weights. If you saw him at the gym often times he’d be by far the fittest person there.
He likes to avoid overly risky situations. He doesn’t fly unless he has to because the crowded conditions of the airport/flight increase his chance of getting sick, and with an HIV patient a minor illness can snowball catastrophically.
He also stays away from crowded clubs or bars, stuff like that.
He’s shown no signs of being sickly or ill for about 10 years now, when he had his last scare and was practically on his death bed. So I’d say it’s certainly possible that lots of people with the illness can live for a very long time and still be doing quite well.
I believe one serious killer in the US of HIV or AIDS patients is cryptosporidium.
One reason for this is that at the moment there isn’t a drug that can cure it, and so it is left for the immune system, which normally does cope, but not those with compromised ones such as AIDS, or those taking immunosupressant drugs such as transplant patients.
HIV/AIDS patients should drink bottled water rather than tap water to cut down the risk of crypto. It’s SOP in the UK and Ireland.