Question
What happens if I stop taking treatment?
31 August 2016. Related: Adherence, All topics, Changing treatment, Side effects, Southern Africa, Stopping treatment.
What are the side effects if someone stops taking her medication for HIV?
Answer
Thanks for your question.
May I ask why you are thinking of stopping? Many people find adhering hard at some in their lives but there are ways to make it easier. Likewise if you are suffering side effects – you can switch to meds that better suit you.
Several years ago a very large study called SMART reported that stopping treatment increased the risk of serious complications. These included a higher risk for heart, liver and kidney complications in people who stopped treatment and also a higher rate of some cancers.
If you decide to stop treatment, your viral load is likely to rebound within a few weeks. If you stay off treatment your CD4 count will start to drop over the next few months. When this happens the risk of developing other infections and getting sick increases.
How quickly this will happen though varies a lot. The lower your CD4 count was when you started meds, the quicker your CD4 is likely to fall without ART.
In the SMART study, most people who took a treatment break did pretty well for a short time. However, most people were not able to recover their CD4 count to earlier levels even 18 months after they restarted treatment.
Please talk to your doctor about who you feel. It is not generally good to stop treatment. It is definitely not good to do this without first talking to your doctor.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
I’m hiv positive, been on medication for 6 years without sloping. The problem is that I had to travel to hiv restricted area and it will take about 8 days for me to get my medication. Please advice
Hi Blessing,
It’s good that you’re thinking of starting HIV treatment (ART) again. ART can reduce your viral load to such tiny amounts that your CD4 count can recover. And that can benefit your health. Please see this page from ART in pictures that shows what happens when we start ART.
Please tell your doctor what meds you were taking. Your doctor may want to start you on different meds. But you can ask for a blood test to see whether your old meds will work well. However, if you stopped because of side effects you can ask for different meds that will be easier for you to take.
Please let us know how you get on.
Hi have stopped talking my med for over a year plus now. What will happen if I start over again
Hi Anonymous,
ARVs need to be taken daily. If your asking how long will it take for your viral load to rebound, this is usually a week.
Even if you had appendectomy you should still be taking your meds.
I stopped taking medication for about 3 days now because of appendectomy. My doctor didn’t advise yet to take my meds but I’m now allowed to drink water. How long will it be safe for me to not drink medication?
Hi Robert,
I’m sorry to hear this. What country do you live in? There could be local organisations that can give support to access HIV medication.
The cost of the medication has become unaffordable. My copay assistance doesn’t pay enough even with insurance. I am deciding to go off the meds. How long will I live?
Hi Greg,
It looks like your HIV treatment is working well.
First, your CD4 count is strong. However, CD4 counts can vary from day to day. And people with a CD4 count of 600 can be no less healthy than someone with a CD4 count of 900. Please see this link to what is a normal CD4 count.
Please look at this link to log tables. Log value is a measurement used to describe HIV and expresses the viral load values as a power of ten. You can see that Log 1.46 equals about the same as 29 copies/mL.
So the results look good and unchanged. What HIV meds are you taking?
Hi, i been on treatment for 8 months. My Vl dropped from over 1 million to 29 and cd4 went from 209 to 1246 in 6 months. My latest test Vl went up to log 1.46 and cd4 dropped to 950. I did have a slight cold but recovered from it in 5 days.
Should i be concerned?
GW
Hi Anonymous,
Please see Q4 here: http://i-base.info/qa/what-are-the-most-asked-questions