Neuro Aids

[ACinKC]

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=2519926

Copy and Paste the first part:
By LAURAN NEERGAARD AP Medical Writer

WASHINGTON Oct 2, 2006 (AP)— It's an Achilles' heel of HIV therapy: The AIDS virus can sneak into the brain to cause dementia, despite today's best medicines. Now scientists are beginning to test drugs that may protect against the memory loss and other symptoms of so-called neuroAIDS, which afflicts at least one in five people with HIV and is becoming more common as patients live longer.

With almost 1 million Americans, and almost 40 million people worldwide, living with HIV, that's a large and underrecognized toll.

"That means HIV is the commonest cause of cognitive dysfunction in young people worldwide," says Dr. Justin McArthur, vice chairman of neurology at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, who treats neuroAIDS. "There's no question it's a major public health issue."

While today's most powerful anti-HIV drugs do help by suppressing levels of the virus in blood so that there's less to continually bathe the brain they can't cure neuroAIDS. Why? HIV seeps into the brain very soon after someone is infected, and few anti-HIV drugs can penetrate the brain to chase it down.

"Despite the best efforts of (anti-HIV) therapy, brain is failing," says Dr. Harris Gelbard, a neurologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center. He is part of a major new effort funded by the National Institutes of Health to find the first brain-protecting treatments.

What's now called neuroAIDS is much different from the AIDS dementia of the epidemic's early years, when patients often had horrific brain symptoms similar to end-stage Alzheimer's, unable to move or talk. They'd die within six months.

Today, anti-HIV medication has resulted in a more subtle dementia that strikes four years or more before death: At first, patients forget phone numbers and their movements slow. They become less able to juggle multiple tasks.

Some worsen until they can't hold a job or perform other activities, but not everyone worsens and doctors can't predict who will. In a vicious cycle, the memory loss makes many forget their anti-HIV pills, so the virus rebounds.

[Lisa]

Thanks for the article. This pretty well sums up what my HIV doc and the Neurologist have laid at my door. On good days I am able to formulate cogent thoughts and am relatively able to articulate them, but more and more, I have complete days of inability to accomplish much.
This article ties in perfectly with the discussion currently going on in Rab's thread.

[allopathicholistic]

     ONE IN FIVE!?!?!??!! *gulp*!     

(and i was a headcase before HIV, so now what?)

[aztecan]

I think they are being generous. I think the stats are much higher, based on what I've read in the brain fog threads.

The longer we live with the bug, the greater the chance long-term side effects will surface. With quite a few of us on this site having lived 20-plus years with the virus, and most of us reporting some degree of brain fog, I think this will become a much hotter topic as more people survive for longer periods.

HUGS,

Mark

[nick2046]

oh great! one more excuse to forget my mum's b'day.  I read it this morning too, i think.

but seriously, what is life like if the bug has the ability to erase the good/bad memories that make what i am today?  Am i being greedy not willing to pay my toll?