Hi there<\/p>\n
Thanks for sharing your experience and for saying how you feel. This is somethiing that other people have reported too, so you are not the only one to report this.<\/p>\n
Please do not stop ART – but do talk to your doctor. The details below shows why some options might be better than others.<\/p>\n
What does your doctor has said about this?<\/strong><\/p>\n Did you clinic weigh you when you started and have they been weighing you \u2013 and measuring your waist and hips etc too? Knowing your normal weight and height is really important.<\/p>\n You change in weight needs to be recorded in your clinic notes. If you have put on more than 5-10% of your body weight over six months, the doctor needs to take this serioously.<\/p>\n Talking to your doctor is important. Also for the clinic to recognise that this is causing you a problem. This is so you can talk about options.<\/p>\n Stopping treatment is not a good thing to do. Certainly not for most people.<\/strong><\/p>\n Some HIV meds can cause weight gain and some cause weight loss. For example, integrase inhibitors like dolutegravir and bictegravir are linked to weight gain in some people<\/strong>. Efavirenz (EFV) and tenofovir disoproxil (TD) can casue weight loss in some people<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n Becasue this isn\u2019t in everyone, the individual monitoring is important.<\/p>\n This means that changing treatment \u2018might\u2019 help \u2013 although no studies have proved this yet.<\/p>\n What is happening to you as an individual is more important that average results reported from different studies.<\/strong><\/p>\n This includes your HIV history \u2013 ie your CD4 and viral load when you started treatment and the response since.<\/p>\n For example, starting with a very low CD4<\/strong> or high viral load<\/strong> is linked to outting on more weight in the first six months of ART.<\/p>\n If you started wiuth a very high CD4 counts, for example higher than 500, it might be possible to stop ART and monitor you. Please note that treatment guidelines do NOT yet recommend doing this, but it might be an option for a few people.<\/p>\n Also which meds and for how long. It also involves knowing your age, and your normal weight and height, and waist\/hip measurement. If you know your genetic parents or siblings, were they a similar shape and size at your age?<\/p>\n Without this information it is difficult to comment about your choices right now.<\/p>\n Diet and exercise are likely to be important.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n This needs specialist advice \u2013 it won\u2019t help to crash diet \u2013 you still need to eat properly. Being more active each day might help \u2013 nothing crazy \u2013 but maybe walking more if this is safe where you live.<\/p>\n Finally, if changing treatment is not possible, or if this doesn’t work, then meds in development might help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have discovered that I\u2019m HIV positive this year around March 2023, the treatment is giving me a lot of weight, I\u2019m gaining too much and I think I should stop taking treatment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,38,39,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-side-effects","category-starting-treatment","category-support"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22015","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=22015"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22021,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22015\/revisions\/22021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}