The Half Decent Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog

This morning I’ve come across a couple of juicy articles during a lunch-time break pubmed session. Yes, I know it sounds ill to spend your free time pretty much doing research while eating but the problem is we usually don’t eat all together, despite being an only 5-people group, for which, theoretically, this sort of thing should be easy to arrange. Unfortunately, working on different projects results in spending most of our breaks on our own with little time to become intimate with your colleagues.

Nevertheless, those things I read were actually very interesting. To start with meaningful and, perhaps, shocking statistics, I didn’t know that HIV-encephalitis (quickly mentioned yesterday) is, by far, the leading cause of dementia among young adults. In fact, not only do neurological complications result from easy to spread opportunistic infections, but HIV itself is prone to seriously affect the nervous system. There are actually many disorders it can cause, both centrally and peripherally: primary encephalopathies, myelopathy, meningitis and vasculitis, as well as demyelinating neuropathies.

It has been noticed that meningitis can be an early symptom of the infection, which therefore implies that the nervous system is likely to be a major centre for the development of the infection. This is also consistent with the catastrophic, late, neurologic progress of AIDS: the so-called AIDS dementia syndrome. This particular complication of the disease is characterized by cognitive and motor disturbances, such as loss of memory, impaired fine motor control and progressive loss of central control of bladder and bowel.
The damages produced by HIV on the brain appear even more evident during autopsies. HIV-encephalitis leads to atrophy of the brain and there are many other histological abnormalities. In particular, a distinctive feature is the presence of products of the fusion of infected macrophages, which yields, in the end, giant, polynucleated cells.
There is plenty of weird people who cry out loudly whenever you mention antiretroviral agents. However, these evil chemicals seem to remarkably slow the development of this dramatic AIDS- related pathology, only when used at very high doses. That’s probably because some these molecule (including AZT) can jump across the blood-brain barrier, reaching the central nervous system.

Sadly, although scientists have revealed the impact of HIV on central nervous system, no one has yet come up with an explanation for how the infection attack this area and what regulates, at an early stage, the onset of this type of encephalitis.