Hi<\/p>\n
Thanks for your question and for letting us answer this online.<\/p>\n
It sounds like you are getting good care and that your doctor is also giving you good information.<\/p>\n
The change from lamivudine to emtricitabine probably didn’t make much difference but there might be a few theoretical benefits.<\/p>\n
The changes in your CD4 level are also nothing to be worried about. Any CD4 count about 500 is strong and considered normal and you are well above this level.<\/p>\n
The results can fluctuate for all sorts of everyday reasons including time of day, recent exercise or food etc. None of the changes you describe are linked to a clinical concern.<\/p>\n
The finasteride also won’t have affected this.<\/p>\n
You are doing so well that it is not good to think this has been causing you stress :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have been living with HIV for the past 7-8 years and been healthy all the way until now. After the diagnosis, I was on efavirenz\/lamivudine\/tenofovir regimen for about 5 years but almost 1.5 years ago they changed my regimen to efavirenz\/emtricitabine\/eenofovir since they said the lamivudine is an old regimen and its recommended to be changed to emtricitabine which is a newer better replacement.<\/p>\n
After that everything was fine and my CD4 went up to almost 1600 but after few months it dropped to 1441 and on the last test to 1033 all in a span of about 8 months and my viral load is still going down from 40 to 9 in the same span of time.<\/p>\n
The doctor said that there is nothing to be worried about since the CD4 count is still way above the recommended level for HIV patients but still i am very very worried about this issue specially because i am trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle.<\/p>\n
Is there anything that i need to be worried about? is there any test or something that need to ask my doctors to look for? i need to mention that i started to take finasteride 1 mg daily for the past one year for my hair loss that my doctor said has nothing to do with the drop in my CD4 count.<\/p>\n
Please advice what should i do because this is giving my so much stress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-cd4-and-viral-load","category-changing-treatment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16005","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=16005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}