Researchers found that a class generic AIDS drugs frequently used to treat HIV in poor regions can cause premature ageing and escort to age-related diseases like heart disease and dementia. The drugs called nucleoside analog reverse transcriptase inhibitors or NRTIs, damage DNA in the mitochondria of the patient.
It was implausible that newer concoction of AIDS drugs manufactured by firms Pfizer, Gilead and GlaxoSmithKline would wreak analogous levels of damage, ever since they are believed to be less poisonous to mitochondria. However more study is required to make it certain. After some time these side effects become evident.
So there is an uncertainty regarding the future if or not the drugs will cause the problem. The DNA in mitochondria gets copied throughout lifetimes and, as people age, naturally accumulates errors, explained lead author Patrick Chinnery from the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Newcastle University.
They believe these HIV drugs hasten the rate at which these errors accumulate. So over the period, say ten years a person’s mitochondrial DNA may have built up the same amount of errors as a person who has naturally aged twenty or thirty years, stated Chinnery. The study was published in the journal Nature Genetics.
The finding however explains why HIV infected people treated with traditional antiretroviral AIDS drugs sometimes show advanced signs of frailty and disease like heart disease and dementia in an early age. NRTI drugs, the best known of which AZT developed by GSK, were big advance in HIV treatment. They extended lives of the patients and make it manageable chronic disease.
The Worries about toxicity of long-term use of NRTIs drugs, are less commonly used in affluent countries where they have been replaced by newer more expensive combination AIDS drugs with fewer side-effects. But in poorer countries the only option for HIV patients is to get treatment with NRTIs so these drugs are used widely.
Chinnery’s team found that patients who had been treated with NRTIs , even as long as ten years formerly had damaged mitochondria analogous to that of a healthy older person. They are now searching for the ways to repair damage caused by the drugs and believe that focusing on exercise, which seems to have a beneficial effect on patients with mitochondrial diseases may help.