antiretroviral therapy
Meaning of antiretroviral therapy: Because HIV can develop resistance to a single drug relatively quickly, antiretroviral therapy nearly always combines medications from more than one class.
Definition of antiretroviral therapy
Antiretroviral therapy is treatment using drugs designed to interfere with the ability of a retrovirus, a class of virus that includes the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, to replicate within the body. These drugs act at different steps of the virus's replication cycle, including blocking the enzyme the virus uses to convert its genetic material into a form usable by the host cell, or preventing the virus from entering a cell in the first place.
Antiretroviral therapy for HIV nearly always combines several drugs from different classes at once, an approach that reduces the likelihood the virus will develop resistance compared with using a single drug alone, since a mutation allowing resistance to one drug is unlikely to also confer resistance to the others used simultaneously.
Antiretroviral therapy does not eliminate HIV from the body entirely, but consistent treatment can reduce the amount of virus in the blood to a level too low to detect with standard testing, substantially lowering the risk of transmission and of progression to advanced disease.
Also known as
Used in a sentence
The patient's viral load became undetectable after several months of antiretroviral therapy.
Good to know
Antiretroviral therapy reduces HIV to an undetectable level in the blood with consistent treatment but does not eliminate the virus from the body, a distinction between viral suppression and a cure.
Word origin
Where “antiretroviral therapy” comes from
Formed from Greek anti-, meaning against, and retro-, from Latin retro, meaning backward, referring to the reverse transcription process characteristic of a retrovirus, combined with virus.