Anti-HIV drugs may protect against puberty delays in HIV-infected children

Posted by Neill Abayon


For children who have been HIV-infected since birth, current anti-HIV drug regimens may protect against the delays in puberty that had been seen in HIV-infected children taking older regimens, according to researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health.

HIV appears to delay puberty. Among children born before 1990, more than 10 percent of HIV-positive girls and boys had not entered puberty by 12 and 13 years of age, respectively. However, a study published in the journal AIDS has found that puberty was delayed for less than 1 percent of children born since 1997, when more effective anti-HIV drug therapies became widely available. Combination antiretroviral treatments — three or more drugs from two or more different anti-HIV drug classes — are now the standard therapy.

Presumably, improved health resulting from the more effective therapy allows the children to enter puberty on a more age appropriate timetable, said study author Rohan Hazra, M.D., of the Maternal and Pediatric Infectious Disease Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Based on information collected over 12 years from more than 2,000 HIV-infected boys and girls, the researchers found that for each year of combination antiretroviral treatment a child received, puberty started about a month earlier when compared to children with HIV who took other drug therapies or no drugs at all.

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No sign of HIV return in bone marrow transplant patients, say scientists Two men who had longstanding HIV infections have stopped taking Aids drugs and have no detectable HIV in their blood

Timothy Henrich of the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston speaks at the International Aids Society Conference in Kuala Lumpur. Photograph: Lai Seng Sin/AP

By Sarah Boseley


Two men who became free of HIV infection after bone marrow transplants have stopped taking Aids drugs without any sign of the virus returning, according to scientists.

Talk of a cure is premature, the doctors told the International Aids Society conference in Kuala Lumpur, but the news will raise hopes that progress can be made towards a treatment that will not only keep the virus at bay but eventually eradicate it.

The two men, who had longstanding HIV infections, were given bone marrow transplants at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Centre in Boston because they were suffering from cancers of the blood. Tests showed that as their own cells were replaced by cells from the bone marrow donor, the levels of virus in their blood steadily dropped to undetectable.

One of the men stopped taking antiretroviral medication to suppress HIV almost four months ago and the other seven weeks ago. They still have no detectable HIV in their blood cells.

"While these results are exciting, they do not yet indicate that the men have been cured," said Timothy Henrich, from the division of infectious diseases at Brigham. "Long-term follow up of at least one year will be required to understand the full impact of a bone marow transplant on HIV persistence."

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HIV/Aids drugs: WHO to recommend earlier treatment

By Jane Dreaper
Health correspondent, BBC News

New guidelines for HIV treatment could see millions more people in developing countries getting life-saving medicine.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is recommending that patients start taking medication at a much earlier stage of the disease.

The WHO says the guidelines, which are being launched at an international Aids conference in Kuala Lumpur, could help avert an extra 3m Aids deaths by 2025.

The charity MSF welcomed the move - but said extra investment would be needed.

A single pill combining three drugs will be given to people who are HIV positive much earlier, while their immune systems are still strong. Algeria, Argentina and Brazil are already doing this.

Not everybody who needs the medicine currently receives it, although big strides have been made in recent years in widening access to HIV treatment.

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