![]() The device now allows clinicians to measure HIV/AIDS patients’ frailty in a matter of seconds, rather than requiring several clinic visits. The team employed another major advancement in the treatment of HIV/AIDS: a “frailty meter,” developed by Bijan Najafi when he was a faculty member in the UA Department of Surgery and director of the Interdisciplinary Consortium on Advanced Motion Performance. Today, patients take a single anti-retroviral pill containing three medications once a day, “with virtually no side effects,” Klotz said. In the early 1980s, patients with HIV might have taken nearly 20 pills a day, with many suffering severe side effects. “Recently, we demonstrated a marked improvement in aging markers in HIV patients on long-term anti-retroviral drug therapy.” In addition, prolonged anti-retroviral therapy restores cellular function and numbers of cells adversely affected by HIV,” Klotz said. “We have shown that years of anti-retroviral therapy can return patients to a non-frail state. Thanks to new treatments, disfiguring lipodystrophy – changes in body fat that affect some patients – is “a grim historical footnote to the HIV epidemic in the United States,” the authors added. 25 in the Journal of the International Association of AIDS Care Providers. Now, frailty related to HIV infection is "rapidly becoming a specter of the past," Klotz and his co-authors noted in the article, HIV Infection-Associated Frailty: The Solution for Now is Antiretroviral Drugs, published Feb. Klotz, M.D., professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases in the UA Department of Medicine, said that in the past, HIV/AIDS patients often suffered from extreme frailty, aging 10-15 years in appearance and function. Remarkable advancements in HIV/AIDS treatments have made the infection almost undetectable in patients who strictly comply with their medication therapy, according to a recently published article authored by a clinical team at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson. ![]()
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