Health and Fitness. HIV

Drugs that treat HIV cause premature ageing

ANI | Jun 27, 2011, 03.40pm IST

Drugs that treat HIV may cause premature ageing (Thinkstock photos/Getty Images)
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A new study has shown that a particular class of anti-retroviral drugs commonly used to treat HIV, can cause premature ageing.

The results were particularly evident in Africa and other low-income countries where the drug is widely used.

The study revealed that the drugs damage the DNA in the patient's mitochondria, commonly known as the 'batteries', which power their cells.
The findings explained why HIV-infected people treated with antiretroviral drugs sometimes show advanced signs of frailty and age-associated problems such as cardiovascular disease and dementia, at an early age.

The nucleoside analogue reverse-transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), of which the most well known is Zidovudine, were the first class of drugs developed to treat HIV.

"HIV clinics were seeing patients who had otherwise been successfully treated but who showed signs of being much older than their years. This was a real mystery," Professor Patrick Chinnery, from the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Newcastle University, said.

Chinnery and his colleagues tried to understand what the drug was doing at a cellular level, so they studied muscle cells from HIV-infected adults, some of whom had previously been given NRTIs.

They found that patients who had been treated with NRTIs even as long ago as a decade previously had damaged mitochondria, which resembled that of a healthy aged person.

"The DNA in our mitochondria gets copied throughout our lifetimes and, as we age, naturally accumulates errors," Chinnery explained.

"We believe that these HIV drugs accelerate the rate at which these errors build up.

"So over the space of, say, ten years, a person's mitochondrial DNA may have accumulated the same amount of errors as a person who has naturally aged twenty or thirty years.

"What is surprising, though, is that patients who came off the medication many years ago may still be vulnerable to these changes," he added.

The study has been published in the journal Nature Genetics.

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