HIV patients aging prematurely [View all]

For a long, dark time in the 1980s and '90s, the Shanti Project and other agencies like it provided hospice-like services to the thousands of men suffering, and dying, from AIDS in San Francisco.

And then there was monumental success: new drugs to fight the virus and lift the death sentence of HIV infection. With the virus under control in their bodies, patients were healthy and active. They had decades of living ahead of them.

Many of them left the supportive care of places like Shanti, said Kaushik Roy, executive director of the program.

"Now they're coming back," he said.

More than a decade after the first truly successful AIDS drugs became available, a new image of HIV is emerging: People with the virus appear to be aging prematurely. After years of feeling healthy and recharged with the new drugs, they're suddenly slowing down not from the effects of AIDS, but from old age - a decade or two earlier than their noninfected peers.

http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/HIV-patients-aging-prematurely-3893804.php

My body looks normal still, but my insides are definitely aging. I have been to the Doctors more this year for non related AIDS medical problems than I should at a person my age. I have discussed this at length with my infectious disease doctor & he told me even though there have been major advancement's, because most drugs are still new, not all is still known to the long term effects of the medicine's.

Case in point, there is no reason I should have a vitamin D deficiency (they have tried everything to boost it in my body and nothing is working), my body is just not accepting vitamin D from any source. I have other issues as well.

Though the medicine I am on has literally saved my life in the short term, we are going to have to deal with the long term effects.

Has anyone else here spoke to their doctor about long term effects?