Editorial: HIV and Illicit Drugs of Abuse

Drugs of abuse plays a major role in increasing the risk of HIV transmission, disease progression, and less adherence to the antiretroviral therapy, which significantly contribute for morbidity and mortality of the HIV infected patients (Anthony et al., 1991; Arnsten et al., 2002). While injection drug use is the second most common route for the HIV transmission, alcohol consumption, smoking, inhaling, and ingesting drugs such as heroin, morphine, crack cocaine, methamphetamine (METH) will increase the risk for obtaining HIV infection (Friedland and Vlahov, 2011). Heroin is the most commonly used illicit drug in HIV patients followed by stimulants such as cocaine and METH (AIDSinfo, 2012). Drug abuse is one of the risk factors for severe neurocognitive dysfunctions in HIV-positive individuals (Nath et al., 2002). Therefore, drugs of abuse and their role on inducing HIV pathogenesis/neuropathogenesis is an urgent need to study for the development of potential therapeutics for HIV infected drug abuser. In this special issue, Garin et al. reported that recreational drug use is higher in HIV infected persons than the general population and cannabis is the highly used recreational drug in the Europe followed by cocaine, amphetamines and ecstasy. Opioid abuse increases the HIV disease progression by effecting host immune function, promoting the virus entry into the immune cells and replication and it also causes severe neurocognitive disorders by inducing the neuro-inflammation (Roy et al., 2011; Smith et al., 2014). While gut microbiota helps in regulating immune homeostasis, both HIV and opioids are known to disrupt gut homeostasis, gut immunity, and microbial translocation that may lead to the accelerated HIV disease progression. In this context, Meng et al. reviewed the mechanisms of opioid induced HIV disease progression by disrupting the gut homeostasis. As pathological pain is more common in 50% of HIV/AIDS patients, HIV-infected opioid abusers reported to show severe neuropathology than HIV-infected non-drug users (Bell et al., 1998, 2006; Smith et al., 2014). Liu et al. reviewed potential mechanisms that induce neuropathic pain in HIV and opioids interaction. While heroin has been reported to increase the HIV infection in macrophages by inhibiting the HIV restriction miRNAs (miRNA-28, miRNA-125b, miRNA-150, and miRNA-382), naltrexone (opioid-receptor antagonists) reported to recover the expression of these miRNAs (Wang et al.). Also, Lan et al. discussed about the association of Apolipoprotein L1 (APOL1) variants (G1 and G2 alleles) in Heroin-associated Nephropathy (HAN) and Human Immunodeficiency Virus associated Nephropathy (HIVAN) in African Americans which …