Researchers have recently found that a cheaper laboratory test that can guide anti-retroviral drug treatment for people with HIV/AIDS might be as effective as the more sophisticated test. The more advanced test is quite pricey, so this discovery of a cheaper test can really help those out in rural Africa. Researchers said that the more expensive test, called viral load testing, may not give a substantial benefit over the cheaper test. This cheaper test is the older one called CD4+ testing. A professor at the University of California, San Francisco said that researchers should focus more on the CD4+ testing if you really are not getting that much clinical gain for the expense of viral load testing. Both of these tests require blood samples from patients. The samples are then analyzed for traces of the virus. The CD4+ test looks at the abundance of the blood of human immune cells. The viral load test looks for copies of viral genomes and measures the amount of virus the person has. The viral load test may seem like the way to go. However, the CD4+ test measures the amount of CD4+ cells in the bloodstream. These cells are killed by HIV during the course of infection, and the amount of CD4+ cells goes down. A clinical trial was tested in Uganda by treating patients in three different ways: CD4+ testing, viral load testing, or no treatment at all. The analysis showed that viral load testing provided little to no clinical benefit over CD4+ testing. The cost for both per year: CD4+ testing is $174 per year and viral load testing is $5,000 per year.
Thats cool to hear that we can have a cost efficient way for this testing and still have it as helpful as it appears to be. Hopefully it can work out the way it has been described. That would be an all around great thing to have.
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