Among the most common infectious diseases in our country, AIDS is the most dangerous. This disease is highly contagious, spreads widely and seriously endangers people’s lives. It is necessary for us to understand the staging and clinical symptoms of AIDS so that we can take protective measures in our life and stay away from the occurrence or infection of the disease.
There is a complete natural process from HIV infection to disease onset, which is clinically divided into four stages: acute infection stage, asymptomatic infection stage (latent stage), pre-AIDS stage, and typical AIDS stage.
Not every infected person will have a complete presentation of the four phases, but patients in each disease stage can be seen clinically. The different clinical manifestations of the four periods are a gradual and coherent progression of the disease process.
1. Acute infection phase: The window period is also during this time, which is mostly between 2 and 12 weeks, mostly 6 weeks, during which the antibody is below the detection limit. The acute phase usually occurs 2 to 4 weeks after HIV infection. Most patients have mild clinical symptoms that last 1 to 3 weeks in remission, with fever being the most common, accompanied by sore throat, night sweats, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, arthralgia, and swollen lymph nodes. Some also develop acute aseptic meningitis, manifesting as headache, neurological symptoms and meningeal irritation.
2, asymptomatic infection period (latent period): infected people can have no clinical symptoms, but the latent period is not a quiescent period, much less a safe period, the virus is continuing to multiply, has a strong destructive effect, the immune system is impaired, CD4 cells continue to decrease, mostly below 350/mm3, and is infectious. The incubation period refers to the time from the start of HIV infection to the appearance of clinical signs and symptoms of AIDS. The average incubation period of AIDS is now considered to be 2-10 years. This causes great difficulties in early detection of patients and prevention.
3.Pre-AIDS: The period of time after the incubation period when AIDS-related signs and symptoms begin to appear until the development of typical AIDS. There are many names for this period, including “AIDS-related syndrome”, “lymphadenopathy-related syndrome”, “persistent pancystic lymphadenopathy”, “pre-AIDS syndrome”, and “pre-AIDS syndrome”. “Pre-AIDS syndrome”, etc. At this time, the patient already has the most basic characteristics of AIDS, i.e. cellular immune deficiency, CD4 cell count is mostly 350~200/mm3, only the symptoms are mild.
4, typical AIDS stage: some scholars call it lethal AIDS, is the final stage of HIV infection, CD4 cell count is mostly below 200 / cubic millimeter, this stage has three basic characteristics: severe cellular immune deficiency occurs in a variety of fatal opportunistic infections. Various malignant tumors occur. In the end stage of AIDS, the immune function collapses completely and the patient develops various severe syndromes until death.
The most important thing is whether the blood test is positive or not. Therefore, if you suspect that you are infected with HIV, you should go to the local health and quarantine department for examination in time.