What happens after you start treatment?

[sanduneboi]

I totally understand how the medication works, what I'm curious about is how the body reacts once the medication keeps the virus from doing its thing. Does the body start battling the virus (picturing scenes from star wars in my head) and start building up its own resistance to the virus? In case anyone is curious my doctor for some reason lacks the ability to explain exactly how things are working, not sure why. Moving out of state soon anyway so will have to find a new one, but that's a different post for a different time.

[surf18]

depends on the meds your on. for instance the med I'm on prohibits the virus from attaching to my cd4 cells so thats how my body is protected from the virus. different classes of drugs do different things in keeping us in good shape. what meds are you on?

[Ann]

Have you found the Lessons section of this website yet? One of the areas of the Lessons is The HIV Live Cycle and it explains how the different classes of meds attack the virus at different points of its life cycle.

Your body is constantly fighting the virus whether you take meds or not. The meds help your body fight and the meds are much more effective at fighting it than our bodies could ever hope to be.

They don't help your body develop resistance to the virus - if you stop taking the meds, you'll be back to square one with your body struggling to mount an effective defense.

Does that help? If you need further clarification after reading the Lessons and my post, don't hesitate to ask.

Good luck with the meds - I hope you do well and respond quickly.

Ann

[leatherman]

I totally understand how the medication works, what I'm curious about is how the body reacts once the medication keeps the virus from doing its thing. Does the body start battling the virus (picturing scenes from star wars in my head) and start building up its own resistance to the virus?

If you know what the meds do (interrupt HIV in various points of it's lifecycle) then you know all there is. Your body does as much as possible; but because HIV is a very adaptive retrovirus, the body is unable to win because HIV destroys the immune system which would be do the "battling". Besides the body's immune system just isn't able to battle this kind of virus properly - unless you have the ccr5 mutation, and then that's not a battle but a different in the immune system. That's why untreated HIV turns to AIDS and ends in death.

So the meds block the HIV from doing it's thing, and your body is able to go on doing it's normal thing. Without the meds, HIV does it thing and you body loses. There is never any Star Wars battle about it, at least not from the body perspective. The Star Wars style battling only comes through the meds.

[eric48]

Hi,

Now that there is a large amount of information and patient follow up, I think the 'tough' meds are being phased out and the meds listed in the current guidelines are more or less the same (altogether). What differ is the patient's profile and you may want to spend some time with your doc discussing option with regards to your own specifics (age, smoking, habits, funding, resistance test...)

I did that and my doc came up with a quite unusual combo: he seems extatic with the favorable numbers and outcome. I have a few complaints, but nothing or noone to compare too...

A few drugs seem to be a tiny bit easier than others, but, even on those, some patients had to switch away because of side effects

Eric

 

[newt]

In short, HIV goes to sleep, hides away dormant in places  that it's hard for the drugs to get to, your CD4 count (usually) rises and you feel better.

- matt

[J.R.E.]

  different classes of drugs do different things in keeping us in good shape.

I always thought this animation was pretty well done , in explaining the mode of action of a particular class of drugs.  In this case Viramune ( Nevirapine ) NNRTI

I think I had to watch this a few times to completely understand it, but it gave me a better  understanding, on  how the drugs work :


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUUyd5bE9vQ



Ray