I've heard this term protease inhibitor? What does this mean if a drug is a "booster"? I am taking Crixivan? Would that help me?

Hmmm... well, I am not sure exactly what you are asking about but let me take a guess.

You are taking a protease inhibitor - Crixivan. What this means is that this drug interferes with a key step in the virus life cycle - a step that involves the use of an enzyme that the virus makes called a protease enzyme. And Crixivan, like the other protease inhibitors, inhibits the ability of the virus to make more virus. The meds do this by just getting in the middle to the active place on the enzyme - like putting a wrench in the cogs of the machine. And when the enzyme stops, so does the virus factory stop.

Now - what is a booster? Well, anything that increases the potency of a medication can be called a booster. With Crix - there is some recent work going on to suggest that adding ritonavir/Norvir to the Crix can actually increase to potency or ability to stop HIV - this may be what you have heard about in terms of a booster effect. So far the most widely studied dose has been 400 milligrams of each drug taken twice a day - ritonavir is now a (bitter) liquid and 400 mg. is about a teaspoon, and Crix comes in 400 mg capsules - so just one cap twice a day with the norvir. And adding norvir also allow you to take the Crix with food - the boosting effect is that powerful so that only one capsule of Crix with food does the job. (and even taking the water each day may be less necessary with this approach...) And because there are somewhat more steady blood levels of Crix with this approach - and maybe because norvir is active at this dose as well - there appears to be some boosting of the antiviral benefit when compared to just taking the usual dose of Crixivan.

Hope that is what you were asking about... CC