Remembering to take one’s pills at the right time every day isn’t always easy and sticking to a pill-taking schedule is very important because these drugs leave the body very quickly. One needs to have a certain number of antiretroviral drugs in one’s blood to keep the virus suppressed. Missing doses leads to drug levels dropping too low to control the virus.
Worse yet, those low drug levels can lead to drug resistance. Thus, if one develops resistance to a drug, the drug won’t work for that person ever again. It’s possible that through careful communication with one’s doctor, he will be able to find something else, but it’s better to keep one’s current treatment working than it is to exhaust one’s options.
Life Long treatment
According to scientific research, HIV treatment is a lifelong necessity. This is because HIV can stay inside infected cells of the body for a very long time. It only takes a few infected cells to restart the whole process of HIV replication once treatment is stopped.
Several large clinical trials have looked at the outcomes of planned or “structured” treatment interruptions, in which people went off their antiretroviral drugs for a specific length of time or based on their CD4 counts. The idea was that as long as CD4 counts were above a certain level, it might be safe to go off treatment without becoming ill. Unfortunately, and to many people’s surprise, these treatment interruptions proved to be more harmful than helpful for many people living with HIV. In one large clinical trial, people who interrupted their treatment were nearly three times more likely to die or develop serious infections than people who stayed on treatment continuously. The people who took breaks from their treatment were more likely to experience many kinds of serious health problems, including cancer, life-threatening infections, heart attack, stroke, kidney damage and liver damage.
Evidently, living with HIV is a daily challenge. Staying on one’s ARV’s are well worth it as opposed to stopping them, only to fall victim to other such life-threatening diseases.
Thus, from the time of diagnosis, it is prudent to be aware of how and where to access ARV’s as they provide life support.