Response from Dr. Sherer
The most important place for this conversation is with your doctor. I urge you to see him or her as soon as possible to explore your treatment options, and to understand why you stopped your drugs. I will offer some observations here and urge you to take a copy with you to see your doctor as soon as possible.
If the regimen you describe was fully suppressive when you stopped taking it, and you stopped all of the medications at the same time when you stopped, then the chances are good that it will again be fully suppressive.
If your regimen was not controlling your virus 2 months ago, I would not expect it to be effective if you start the same regimen again.
This answer would have been different if you were taking a regimen with an NNRTI like efavirenz (EFV or Sustiva or Stocrin) or nevirapine (NVP or Viramune), because these drugs have a half life of days to weeks in the blood, and so are vulnerable to drug resistance when regimens containing them are abruptly stopped.
In contrast, the boosted PIs like Kaletra (lopinavir/r) and Reyataz (atazanavir) have a higher genetic barrier to resistance and shorter half lives in the plasma, so that resistance is far less common when regimens containing these drugs are stopped abruptly.
You should talk to your doctor about stopping the medications, though. There is ample evidence that once started, ART is best continued. Treatment interruptions have been associated with both a higher risk of HIV disease progression (either a new OI, falling CD4 cells, or death), as well as a higher risk of non-HIV related complications like heart disease, liver disease, and kidney disease. I don't recommend treatment interruptions to my patients, and I definitely don't think that undertaking a treatment interruption on your own, i.e. without your doctor's knowledge or agreement, is a good thing to do.
It would be important for you to share your reasons for not taking these drugs for two months. After 15 years being HIV positive, were you just tired of taking medicines every day? That would certainly be understandable. Were there side effects that were uncomfortable? That is important to share with your doctor, as there may be alternatives open to you and your doctor that would change the side effect profile of the regimen.
In sum, talk to your doctor about these events, and make a plan with him or her regarding your future treatment options.
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