Are Natural Supplements an Answer to the Problem of Hiv / Aids?: a Mathematical Approach

The devastating impact of HIV as a chronic infectious agent on human kind has forced a consideration of the rationale of administering combined drug therapies that incorporate fusion inhibitors, reverse transcriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitors in chronically infected HIV patients. It is also worth considering using alternative therapies, such as antioxidants, as anti-retroviral therapies are limited for economic reasons and their associated toxicity. This study models and analyzes pre-treatment dynamics of viral production and progression with cellular-mediated immune responses in chronic HIV infection. The pre-treatment model is then extended to investigate the impact of administering a three drug combination regimen of reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors and fusion inhibitors to chronically infected HIV-positive patients. Again from the pretreatment model we develop the antioxidant therapy model that considers HIV-induced free radicals as promoters of apoptosis and viral replication, incorporating antioxidants as agents of oxidative defense against the oxidative pressures caused by the free radical molecules in chronically infected HIV patients..