Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The AIDS virus can be treated earlier in the disease as medicines have become safer, easier to take, and more effective, a panel of U.S. doctors said today. Quicker therapy helps patients avoid long-term complications, they said.

Treatment used to be delayed until certain immune system cells targeted by the disease were nearly depleted and the body could no longer fight off infection from other illnesses. This was because doctors wanted to keep the virus from developing resistance to early drug choices, according to the report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The new recommendations were made by the International AIDS Society-USA Panel, a group of infectious disease doctors convened in February to consider therapy use. They suggest physicians start drug treatment when the number of CD4 cells drops below 350 copies per milliliter of blood. Patients who are already sick with heart, liver or kidney disease may need treatment even earlier, the panel said.

``The substantial toxicity and inconvenience of early regimens dampened enthusiasm for starting therapy at higher CD4 counts,'' the authors, led by Scott Hammer, an AIDS researcher at Columbia University in New York City, wrote. ``However, newer regimens are potent, durable, and less toxic.''

The recommendations were also presented today at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City. The group made its suggestions after a trial in more than 5,000 patients that ended last year, called SMART, showed the advantages of starting treatment before the illness progresses.

Adding 100,000 People

If the guidelines are applied to every infected person in the U.S., it could add more than 100,000 people taking HIV drugs, Hammer said at a news conference in Mexico City today.

``Issues of resistance, cost, and limited treatment options were making people pretty caution about starting therapy knowing that when you started it would be a life-long process,'' Hammer said.

The SMART trial showed that patients who get treatment early in the course of the disease suffer fewer infections related to immune system weaknesses than doctors expected, said John Bartlett, an AIDS researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who wasn't involved in the report, in a telephone interview yesterday.

The trial also showed that early treatment also helped patients avoid heart disease and other conditions that hadn't been associated with HIV, he said.

Drug Combinations

Patients with HIV take powerful drug combinations to counter the virus's ability to mutate into forms that can resist single medications. Truvada, made by Gilead Sciences Inc. of Foster City, California, and Epzicom, made by London-based GlaxoSmithKline Plc, are combination drugs patients take daily.

The new recommendations mean ``everyone is marching to the same drummer and comes to the same conclusions about where we start,'' said Johns Hopkins's Bartlett.

People with the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, will continue to need new drugs as the virus develops resistance to existing treatments, the panel wrote in the journal article. Among the newest entrants to the market are Isentress, made by Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based Merck & Co., and Selzentry, made by New York-based Pfizer Inc., both of which attack the virus in different ways than earlier drugs.

To contact the reporter on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 3, 2008 15:31 EDT