Definition: HAART, or highly active antiretroviral therapy, refers to the use of combinations of various antiretroviral drugs with different mechanisms of action to treat HIV. There are several different drug "cocktails" used as HAART, but it is the use of a combination of drugs that is the most important hallmark of HAART as therapy. HIV can easily develop resistance to individual antiretroviral therapies, but it is harder for HIV to become drug-resistant when multiple antiretroviral drugs with varied mechanisms of action are combined into a single HIV treatment.
HAART usually involves a combination of at least three drugs from two or more classes of antiretroviral treatment. These cocktails of reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors, and other types of HIV treatment may be prescribed either individually or as multiple drugs combined in a single co-formulated pill.
Pronunciation: HAART is pronounced like "heart"
Alternate Spellings: drug cocktail, combination therapy, antiretroviral therapy, triple therapy
Examples:
Atripla is a single dose HAART regimen that contains two nucleoside inhibitors (emtricitabine and tenofovir) and one non-nucleoside inhibitor (efavirenz) to suppress the virus. Certain other combination pills such as Truvada, which contains the two nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors emtricitabine and tenofovir in a single pill, may need to be prescribed with at least one other drug to attain the multiple mechanisms of action required for HAART.
