Thanks for posting a question. I am sorry to the late reply and we\u00a0are double-checking that a few questions were not missed due a staf change here.<\/p>\n
How are you doing?<\/p>\n
Finding out you are positive can be difficult but it is good that you started treatment (ART) and that this is working well.<\/p>\n
Your CD4 count will already be back over 200. It is also very likely to return to your pre-HIV levels because you started ART so quickly.<\/p>\n
Don’t worry about it dipping below 200. This will not be a problem.<\/p>\n
Don’t worry about whether Asian people have slightly lower CD4 counts. This also isn’t important because ART works for all ages, races and genders. There is a lot of natural variation for CD4 counts with a normal range being anything from about 350 to 1600.<\/p>\n
Any figure between this range is technically “normal” for some people. Your individual results are more important than comparing these to average values.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi. Is my CD4 too low?<\/p>\n
I had exposure about two weeks ago and i went for a test three days ago and the result was\u00a0HIV positive. By that time my viral load was 100,000 and CD4 was only 170. I tested negative for antigen and antibody. My doctor has immediately put me on Stribild. I started to have acute symptoms after all the tests but after two days I feel the symptoms are manageable probably due to the medication.<\/p>\n
I read that 1) CD4 falls sharply during acute phase; 2) Asians (me) usually have a lower CD4 level compared to other ethnicities; and 3) CD4 falls below 200 it has become AIDS. Was my CD4 at a “normal” level given I was in the acute phase?<\/p>\n
I’m afraid because my CD4 was too low, I won’t be able to restore it even though I started treatment very early.<\/p>\n
Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-cd4-and-viral-load","category-starting-treatment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}