Causes and treatment of AIDS

When it comes to AIDS, many people stay away from it. Because everyone knows that there is no cure for this disease so far. It can only alleviate the symptoms but cannot be cured. Therefore, when people learn that they or someone they know has contracted AIDS, they are very shocked. Because no one wants to get this disease, and no one knows too much about it. Therefore, when I suffer from this disease, I am also confused.

People who often read reports on this topic should have a certain understanding of AIDS, but people who have not been in contact with it may accidentally be infected with AIDS from others. Some people want to know more about the causes and treatments of AIDS, so let me introduce some to you below.

What are the main types of drugs currently used to fight HIV?

There are many drugs used to treat AIDS around the world, and the standards approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are the most stringent. If the drugs approved by the US FDA in 2001 are taken as the basis, they are divided into two major categories: nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitors, with a total of 15 types.

What are reverse transcriptase inhibitors?

It is now clear that the virus that causes AIDS is called human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and HIV is an RNA virus. After the virus enters the CD4 cells of the human immune cells, it converts RNA into DNA under the action of viral reverse transcriptase, and then enters other stages of the viral life cycle. Therefore, blocking reverse transcriptase can hinder the survival of the virus and achieve the therapeutic purpose. This type of drug is called reverse transcriptase inhibitor.

This category is further divided into two types: nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors.

There are 6 types of nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, the representative drug is zidovudine (ZDV). The drug was first used in 1987. It has many side effects, the main one being bone marrow suppression, which may lead to megaloblastic anemia, neutropenia and thrombocytopenia, etc. Other adverse reactions include proximal myopathy. A small number of patients may experience blue nails, cardiomyopathy, or fatty liver. Long-term use of this drug, especially single-dose treatment, can easily lead to drug resistance. There are currently five other similar drugs used in clinical practice: didanosine (ddI), zalcitabine (ddC), stavudine (D4T), lamivudine (3TC), and Abacavir.

There are three types of non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors: nevirapine, Delaviridine and Efavirenz. This group of drugs is not used alone, but mostly in combination therapy.

What are protease inhibitors?

When viruses living in immune cells want to reproduce new viruses, many precursor proteins are encoded by genes. These proproteins must be cleaved into mature proteins by proteases in order to be used for assembling new viruses. Currently, there are many drugs that inhibit proteases, so that some pre-proteins cannot be cleaved into mature proteins, thereby hindering the composition of the virus. This type of drug is called a protease inhibitor.

The US FDA has approved six protease inhibitors (PIs): Saquinavir, Indinavir, Ritonavir, Nelfinavir, Amprenavir and Lopinavir/Ritonavir capsule combination. These drugs can reduce viral load, but their efficacy as a single drug is poor and they are often used in combination with nucleoside or non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The side effects of saquinavir are relatively mild, including headache, gastrointestinal symptoms, and granulocytopenia. The side effects of indinavir include drug precipitation causing kidney stones, increased serum total bilirubin, anemia, granulocytopenia, etc. Other medicines also have many side effects, so I won’t list them all here.

The above is just for your reference, I hope it will be helpful to you. In daily life, I hope everyone can pay more attention to disease prevention and transmission methods. After understanding the transmission routes of the disease, everyone can take preventive measures to avoid getting the disease themselves. At the same time, they can also improve their awareness of prevention and prevent more people from getting the disease.