Hi<\/p>\n
Thanks for your question.<\/p>\n
The seriousness of HIV-related dementia varies dramatically depending on someone’s individual circumstances and treatment history.<\/p>\n
For example, if someone is newly diagnosed, then even with a CD4 count less than 100, HIV treatment nearly always increases the CD4 count. This may take a year or two, but gradual increases up to 200 and above are common, and this level of immune restoration will provide good protection against HIV-realted infections.<\/p>\n
It is also important to try to get a specific diagnosis for the cause of the dementia. This includes an MRI brain scan and an expert interpretation or the results. This is essential to rule out other causes. The results will determine how serious the impact is on your friends health and whether additional treatment is needed.<\/p>\n
Your friend should also have a partner, friend or family member included in any discussion with the doctor, and this person can ask these questions too.<\/p>\n
Although there are over 25 approved HIV drugs, choosing drugs that are good at getting into the brain are generally recommended. The medical term for this is to ‘penetrate the blood-brain barrier’.<\/p>\n
It is important to know that this has been considered for your friend’s treatment.<\/p>\n
It will also be important for your friend to have support to ensure that all doses are taken every day. This can make a huge difference to whether treatment is successful. By definition, dementia can make it more difficult to remember taking meds, so someone who can make sure no doses are missed will give the drugs the best chance of working and this in turn will hopefully help the dementia to reverse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A friend has a CD4 count of 80 and has HIV-related dementia but it is not too extreme case. How serious is this and how long can he live?<\/p>\n
Can the CD4 count ever increase to a normal level if he is taking the meds provided?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-opportunistic-infections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4102","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=4102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}