When did doctors begin to notice a change in cholesterol levels in their HIV patients?
The history of this goes back to about mid-1996, when protease inhibitors, which are one of the classes of HIV medications that we use, became available. About two years later, the first reports emerged about some changes that were being observed. One of the changes was elevations in cholesterol levels and triglyceride levels. Why is elevated cholesterol a concern for people with HIV? The concern was that we were making people healthier from an HIV standpoint, but we were creating new problems by putting people at risk for cardiovascular disease. Additionally, elevated triglycerides can cause pancreatitis, a painful inflammation of the pancreas. Why did you conduct this study? There is a reasonable amount of information about people before and after they start these highly active HIV medicines. But the MACS study has a lot of information about individuals who came into the study HIV-negative and then acquired HIV infection during the course of the study. We realized that this group pro
