Can antiretroviral treatment fully restore health in most patients?
Although effective antiretroviral treatment prevents AIDS and non-AIDS related morbidity and mortality, treatment does not fully restore health. In a population based cohort study that included all HIV infected patients in Denmark and a larger number of matched non-HIV infected controls, overall life expectancy for those with HIV increased dramatically after the introduction of combination antiretroviral treatment but was lower than that in the uninfected population.3 Similar findings were reported in a more recent study of 14 distinct cohorts.4 In the French population, mortality in HIV infected patients approached that in uninfected patients only if treatment could durably increase peripheral CD4+ T cell counts into the normal range.5 All these studies had limitations (limited follow-up, inability to control for all confounding variables), but the consistency of the findings are hard to ignore. Low CD4+ T cell counts during treatment predict non-AIDS events Further evidence that trea
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