Dr. Susan Koletar has been researching HIV for the past 30 years and has made groundbreaking discoveries in treatment. Credit: Courtesy of the Wexner Medical Center
An Ohio State researcher who has made groundbreaking discoveries in HIV treatment wants to remind the younger generation that HIV is not a curable disease, and the danger is still real.
Dr. Susan Koletar, director of Ohio State’s Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Internal Medicine, has been studying HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, for the past 30 years.
In Koletar’s study, the START trial, she researched the benefits and consequences associated with starting treatment at different stages of HIV once a person knows they have contracted the infection.
She said that in the past, doctors were hesitant to start treatment right away because of the problematic side effects of the medications.
Koletar remembered a patient from the 1990s who said, “I would just rather die than take these medicines.”
According to Koletar, despite the fact that an HIV treatment with minimal side effects has been invented, there was little research on when to start treatment. Koletar’s research sought the answer.
In her START study, Koletar ran trials with thousands of participants to learn the best time to start treatment.
Koletar said most people are aware of HIV, but many people do not see it as a serious condition. While there is a successful treatment for HIV, it does not come without burdens.
“It is not necessarily devastating news when people of [the younger] generation get infected because they think ‘Oh I’ll just take a pill,’ well [they’re] taking a pill for the rest of [their] life,” Koletar said. “There are probably things that we don’t know.”
She said that the success of the treatment should not encourage people to engage in risky behavior such as unprotected sex and intravenous drug use.
“The danger is complacency,” Koletar said. “We’ve been so successful with [HIV treatment].”
Carlos Malvestutto, an infectious disease doctor at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center, shares Koletar’s opinion when it comes to the dangers of complacency and HIV.
Malvestutto said that generally the millennial generation does not know anyone who has died from AIDS, let alone anyone who has HIV to begin with. While that is a positive outcome of HIV prevention, it has resulted in a misunderstanding of the disease among the younger generation.
The issue is that younger people no longer see the urgency of the illness firsthand, which results in a lot of naive behavior, Malvestutto said. He has had young patients come for treatment when the virus had already escalated to AIDS, attributing the delay to the current widespread misconception of HIV.
“In some ways we become victims of our own success,” Malvestutto said. “[Our young patients] don’t really understand how devastating HIV can be.”
