How Long Does it Take for HIV Symptoms to Occur?

There are possibly thousands of different symptoms that could occur at any given time throughout all different stages of HIV and AIDS. However, there are several key symptoms that may occur at particular times. The presence of these symptoms can be used to track and diagnose different stages of HIV infection.

Symptoms Related to Initial HIV Infection

• Within three to six weeks, some people will suffer a flu-like disease called acute HIV syndrome. This can include symptoms such as fever, nausea and vomiting, chills, headache, and enlarged lymph nodes.

Seroconversion

• Typically, after the initial flu-like illness associated with infection, a person will begin producing antibodies to HIV. Because this will eliminate the abundance of HIV that resulted from the initial infection, this period is generally devoid of symptoms even though the individual can be highly contagious.

Asymptomatic Stage

• People may spend many years being asymptomatic after seroconversion, sometimes being without major symptoms for a decade or more. However, they may notice swollen lymph glands at times even when no other symptoms are present.

Symptomatic Stage

• Even when HIV seems to be under control, it always remains in the body. Once the immune system becomes depressed and the symptomatic stage begins, those with HIV may start to feel fatigued and start to have noticeable symptoms such as problems with yeast infections and thrush (the uncontrolled growth of yeast in the mouth.) They will also be prone to a number of opportunistic infections.

AIDS Symptoms

• Once a person progresses to AIDS, there is often severe weight loss and they may consistently run fevers or suffer from a low body temperature. AIDS patients often suffer from numerous opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, mycobacterium avian complex, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, and Karposi's sarcoma.