Posted on December 06, 2016
Source: The Hub
"Certain strategies currently being studied for treating and curing HIV could lead to harmful brain inflammation, a new study from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has found.
Part of the difficulty of curing HIV is that the virus is capable of remaining dormant in cells for long periods of time. Common therapies include antiretroviral medications that keep the virus controlled without eradicating it. As a result, HIV is treated as a chronic condition.
But new avenues of research are being explored that involve using so-called latency-reversing agents to awaken the dormant virus with the goal of combining the patient's immune system and antiretroviral medicines to eliminate HIV in the body.
New evidence based on a study of macaques infected with HIV's close cousin, simian immunodeficiency virus, indicates that such strategies—called "shock and kill"—could cause potentially harmful brain inflammation. A report on the findings is published online in the Jan. 2 issue of the journal AIDS."
