Good Results for Treatment-Experienced
posted: 29/10/2009
Excellent news from France for people with drug-resistant HIV due to taking many HIV drugs - people can reach an undetectable viral load with a new three drug combination - the results are almost as good as starting treatment for the first time.
Treatment with a combination of three newer anti-HIV drugs – darunavir/ritonavir (Prezista), etravirine (Intelence) and raltegravir (Isentress) – means that the viral load of patients who’ve taken a lot of anti-HIV drugs in the past and have drug-resistant virus can become undetectable.
French researchers looked at how effective this combination was for 90 people. All had resistance to protease inhibitors and NRTIs. Some patients also took additional drugs in their combination – either two NRTIs or the fusion inhibitor T-20 (enfuvirtide, Fuzeon). These additional drugs were selected after resistance testing and were called the ‘optimised background’.
Results similar to people first starting treatment
After a year of treatment, 83% of people on the new-drug combination had an undetectable viral load. This outcome is similar to that seen in people starting HIV treatment for the first time. It didn’t matter if a person was taking these drugs with an optimised background of other drugs – the results were equally impressive.
People also had good increases in CD4 cell count, and there were no HIV-related deaths. And only one person had to change treatment because of side-effects.
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