There are three major measures that physicians or other providers use when making treatment recommendations to HIV positive individuals. Because of recent information suggesting gender and racial differences in CD4 cells and viral load, there has been concern that the standard recommendations doctors and patients use to guide decisions about initiating or changing treatment may not be correct for women and people of color. Two things must be kept in mind when considering changing the recommendations. Thus it is critically important to determine if the differences in viral load mean that women and people of color do better or worse with treatment than White men. The scientific community is only beginning to be able to answer this question.
Much more research is required.
This suggests that people who initiate treatment later may do just as well as those who initiate treatment relatively earlier, by the current recommendations. Therefore, it is premature to suggest that treatment recommendations for specific groups be changed now. It is not clear whether such a change would mean women or men of color would be treated earlier or later. Investigations of this question should clearly include sufficient numbers of women and of men of color to allow informed decision-making for those groups specifically. However, it is unclear whether these differences indicate that there are clinical differences by race or by gender, even in people not taking any antiretroviral treatment.