Women with HIV need therapy sooner
Researchers call for separate guidelines
Women with detectable viral loads half as big as men's will develop AIDS just as quickly. Therefore, when an HIV-infected woman's viral load is comparable to a man's, the female patient is likely to be closer to developing full-blown AIDS, researchers reported at the 12th World AIDS Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.
That finding has led researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore to call for separate male and female treatment initiation guidelines.
Current guidelines recommend initiating therapy when HIV 1 RNA viral loads reach 10,000 copies per milliliter of blood and CD4 cell counts are at 500 cells per microliter. The guidelines were established largely based on research of the disease in gay men.
"Although it remains unclear why, our data suggest that the current viral load levels now used to signal antiretroviral therapy may have to be revised downward for women by as much as one half," says Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Homayoon Farzadegan, PhD.
Johns Hopkins researchers analyzed frozen blood samples several years old with current samples in HIV-positive men and women, then compared the stage of disease. At similar stages, women had a median viral load of 3,365 copies, while men had 8,907, with the numbers climbing proportionally to 45,416 and 93,130 respectively on follow-up.
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