Month Five of Dr. Michael Snyderman's Antiretroviral Boilermaker

Dr. Michael Snyderman, an oncologist with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and ME/CFS, started the HIV drug AZT five months ago to treat both diseases.  Five days after beginning AZT, he added another HIV drug, raltegravir (Isentress).  The third FDA-approved HIV drug shown in test-tube studies to be effective against XMRV is tenofovir (Viread), which he plans on adding to the mix next month.  "I haven't started tenofovir yet because I want to collect enough data to sort out what is happening," Snyderman explains.  He calls his cocktail a boilermaker.

For the year before he began the HIV meds, Snyderman experienced lower extremity neuropathic pain but couldn't figure out why.  And for a few weeks before beginning treatment he became more fatigued than usual and couldn't concentrate by the end of the workday, "which isn't good if you are taking care of sick people, so I started thinking I would have to retire." In addition, his pain had become "agonizing."

During the first two weeks of treatment, there was no improvement, and the only drug side effect was mild nausea. At the third week, however, the pain resolved completely and his concentration and energy began to improve.  "I am still tired though maybe 25 percent better," Snyderman says.  "I believe it must take a long time to heal the damage done directly by the virus and done by the elevated cytokines. Stopping the virus and lowering the cytokines must be important and should be our initial goal, but there are other issues like dealing with the deconditioning. I am not an expert on CFS so I can't go beyond that."

On the HIV drugs, Snyderman's elevated cytokines have normalized, and his cancer markers have improved as well.

Link to Snyderman's most recent posters here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/40929474  or here:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/40933222