A new study has revealed that how quickly the immune system of a patient suffering from HIV deteriorates might not be end up affecting the outcome of the illness, and this might just help change the present guidelines for treatment of the condition.

As of now, there is no cure for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, that is the root cause of AIDS, but with a combination of drugs, the virus can be kept from replicating and damaging the immune system too rapidly.

Generally, doctors do not start the treatment for HIV till there is some definite evidence of damage to the system, measured by counting the number of immune cells in the body, called the CD4 T-cells.

HIV treatment, in developed countries, starts when CD4 number drops below 350 cells per microlitre of blood. Some treatment guidelines also recommend that the therapy can be started sooner for patients whose CD4 count is falling too rapidly.

The new study, however, discovered that the pace of decline had no significant effect on the outcome of the illness, therefor a fine tuning of the treatment guidelines would be the best thing to do.

"What we looked at was whether it matters how a person reached his current CD4 cell count, whether the CD4 count declined very quickly, or very slowly, and we found that the CD4 cell dynamics don't provide additional information about the patient's prognosis on top of the current CD4 cell count", said Marcel Wolbers of the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.