Posted by 
A researcher at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine has found that the use of stimulants, like methamphetamine can affect the health of HIV-positive patients even when they are adhering to medical treatment.
“Stimulant use may accelerate HIV disease progression through biological and behavioral pathways,” said Adam Carrico, Ph.D., associate professor of Public Health Sciences and Psychology.
Identifying the biological pathways and developing new approaches to optimize the health of active stimulant users who are living with HIV can help. Epigenetic analyses of samples from 55 HIV-positive methamphetamine-men who were receiving effective anti-retroviral therapy shows a differential expression of 32 genes and perturbation of 168 pathways in recent stimulant users, including genes previously associated with the HIV reservoir, immune activation, and inflammation.
Anti-retroviral therapy is effective in suppressing HIV in the blood but the virus remains in reservoirs-lymph nodes and inside some immune cells, stimulants affect pathways in the immune system that allow HIV to become more active and could expand the reservoir. The differences in gene expression in stimulant users are like flipping switches that turn on parts of the immune system that expand the HIV reservoir. The pathways may be used to pull out the hiding virus in the reservoir.
Decreasing the use of stimulants like methamphetamine will allow for better control of the HIV viral load and could even directly improve the immune system. In virally suppressed HIV-positive, methamphetamine-using men, researchers discovered that those with evidence of recent stimulant use displayed greater soluble CD14 (sCD14). This is a clinically relevant marker of monocyte activation that predicts faster clinical HIV progression and cardiovascular disease.
haleplushearty.org