| Treatment* |
| Written by Smith Johnson | |
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Herpes is a chronic disease, but it responds well to treatment. A patient who believes (s) he may have been infected by herpes can prepare for a visit to the doctor by familiarizing herself with the questions a doctor might ask and preparing some questions she might wish to ask herself. A doctor will want to know if the patient has had cold sores on the mouth, or rashes anywhere between the thigh and the waist, either in the recent or the more distant past. She will also ask the patient to describe any current symptoms, and prompt him for details of his sex life -- the date he last had sex, the frequency with which he uses condoms, the number of partners he's had, and the areas of his body that might have come in contact with the virus during sex. The doctor will also want to find what he knows about his sexual partners. To the best of his knowledge, did any of them have genital herpes? The herpes patient can also benefit from asking the doctor lots of questions too. What kind of HSV does he have? How many weeks -- or months, or years -- has he been infected? Does he need to be tested for other STDs, such as HIV or syphilis? What can he do to keep from infecting his partner? What symptoms should he expect, and how often will they return? What effect could herpes have on other health problems? Is it appropriate to take anti-viral medication? Will he be able to have children? Does the doctor have any suggestions for where he can seek out emotional support? Antiviral drugs make herpes easier to live with. They lengthen the time a patient can go on living without symptoms. For patients suffering through outbreaks, they can make the symptoms less severe and long lasting. Doctors can prescribe four different medications to control herpes. Three of them --- acyclovir, famciclovir and valacyclovir -- are pills that can be taken at home. If a herpes outbreak is particularly severe, the patient can be hospitalized and injected with intravenous acyclovir. Skin creams are useless for treating herpes, because the disease originates in the nerve cells, not the skin. If the initial diagnosis of herpes takes place during an outbreak of sores or blisters, the doctor usually prescribes a week to ten days of antiviral therapy to get the symptoms under control. If the sores don't heal in the first ten days, the treatment may go on longer. When the initial outbreak subsides, the patient has two options for continuing treatment, depending on his level of need. The first of these options is known as intermittent treatment. The doctor prescribes antiviral pills for use only during an outbreak. When a patient feels the signs or symptoms of herpes-- tingling, numbness, sores and so forth, he takes the pills for anywhere between 2 and 5 days until the symptoms disappear again. While the sores will heal on their own, an antiviral will speed up the healing process. The second option, suppressive treatment, is the best choice for people who experience frequent or very severe outbreaks, 6 or more times a year. A patient who is highly susceptible to outbreaks can reduce the number of outbreaks by as much as 80% by taking an antiviral pill every day. Indeed, some people never have outbreaks again after they go on anti-viral medicines. Suppressive treatment also makes it harder for an infected partner to transmit herpes to a virus-free partner, simply because they have less HSV in their system. The three antiviral medications used for herpes have few if any side effects, and they appear to be safe for long-term use. The oldest of them, Acyclovir, has been studied extensively. Even among people taking suppressive therapy, scientists found few measurable side effects. About 3 in 1000 herpes patients show resistance to Acyclovir, but the other 997 respond well to treatment and will see their outbreaks become more rare, and their symptoms subside, in response to the medication. Acyclovir does not stay long in the body, so it must be taken frequently. During the most severe outbreaks, herpes patients usually take five 200-mg doses of Acyclovir a day. Valacyclovir has a longer cycle, so patients can take 2 500-mg doses a day. A recent study showed that herpes patients on suppressive medication had an average of 13 outbreaks a year before they were prescribed anti-virals, and less than one outbreak a year once they began taking the pill. Ten years of studies have shown that none of the anti-virals have caused effects, nor have they increased HSV's capacity to resist medication. Although existing antiviral treatments can be viewed as a success, most people would probably prefer to prevent the disease entirely with a herpes vaccine. Scientists have written hundreds of articles about the herpes virus, and in the near future it may be possible to vaccinate infants against the disease. As of 2010, however, no vaccine had been shown to be as safe or effective as the existing antiviral medications. *This article is based on the information at http://www.cdc.gov/std/herpes/STDFact-herpes.htm, http://health.yahoo.com/sexualhealth-overview/genital-herpes-topic-overview/healthwise--te3043.html, http://www.herpes.org/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex, http://www.webmd.com/genital-herpes/default.htm |
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