AIDS (acquired immune deficient syndrome), first discovered in West countries in 1981, is a human infectious disease. AIDS patients, if not be treated, commonly suffer a gradual loss of human immunodefensive functions and finally die of infectious complications within 2 years after AIDS symptoms occur in patients.
 
In the pathogenesis mechanism, AIDS patients are caused by infecting with HIV (human immune-deficiency virus) by sexual transmission, blood donor transmission, drug abuse with contaminate syringes and mother-to-child transmission and so on. The HIV viruses can parasite in human bodies and remain non-pathogenic for certain amount of times, even as long as ten years sometimes. These humans are called HIV infectious. Gradually, HIV viruses inactivate the functions of human immune-system, especially for CD4 lymphocytes. Until the symptoms of immune deficient occur, these patients are then called AIDS patients.
 
AIDS patients can be treated with a series of anti-viral drugs to decrease the virus-load and slow the pace of occurrence AIDS and ameliorate the symptoms of immune deficient and prolong the lifespans of patients.
 
Now, a large number of AIDS patients or HIV infectious can live much longer life (approximately 10 year after first AIDS symptoms occur in patients) if they are properly treated, even achieve normal lifespans.
 
HIV/AIDS patients can be treated and ameliorated with antiviral chemicals. But before the invention of high active antiretroviral therapy (HAART, cocktail therapy), the therapeutic outcomes of AIDS patients were unsatisfactory. The AIDS patients generally died within 2 years after AIDS symptoms occurred.
 
HAART was developed approximately 15 years ago, which was to combine use of antiviral chemicals of different mechanistic types and categories and could prolong the AIDS patients survival to approximately 10 years. This was a great achievement. More infected patients live longer and eventually die of causes that are unrelated to HIV infection. Now HAART become the standard of care for HIV infection [1].
 
More than twenty anti-HIV chemicals have been licensed for formal utilizations worldwide, which are now divided into 6 mechanistic types and categories (Table 1).
 
NNRTIs—non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors
 
NRTIs—nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors
 
The initial HAART therapy is to combine utilize NRTI and NNRTI. Late, more HAART are the combination of NNRTI or NRTI with protease inhibitors. Now more types of antiviral drugs can be combined and some new types of drugs have been hypothesized and studied [2].

Citation: Lu DY, Lu TR (2012) High Active Anti-retroviral Therapy for HIV/AIDS, Progresses and Drawback. Adv Pharmacoepidem Drug Safety 1:e115. doi: 10.4172/2167-1052.1000e115 

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