HIV pill success is boosted by routine

RESEARCHERS increased HIV treatment success rates by almost 18 per cent through a new programme to help patients take their medication correctly.

Their study reported that while HIV medication does not deliver a cure, it works so well that the life expectancy of patients is similar to that of healthy people, while sufferers successfully treated are also extremely unlikely to transmit the virus to others.

However, a significant proportion of people with HIV take their medication too irregularly for it to work well, or discontinue their treatment entirely.

Irregular use of the medication means the virus gets a chance to replicate and can attack the immune system – potentially leading to Aids.

Teams from the universities of Aberdeen and Maastricht and the University and Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam developed a new programme to help people take the medication, using a combination of self-management strategies, counselling and patients tracking their own medication use with electronic pill bottles.

The study found an increase in treatment success rates of almost 18 per cent compared to patients who received regular care, while the programme was also found to be cost-saving.

Professor Marijn de Bruin from Aberdeen University said: “This is the first adherence intervention in HIV care that demonstrates clinical and cost effectiveness. The intervention can be applied in routine clinical care, and the effects have been reproduced in consecutive trials.

“Although today’s HIV medications are very effective, they can have quite a few side-effects and people with HIV don’t usually experience any symptoms of the disease, so – for these and other reasons – it is unsurprising that adherence among some patients is sub-optimal.

“We designed a programme that would fit in with routine care and only adds about 10 minutes to the consultation. Our intervention has proved to be very successful at improving drug-adherence and reducing treatment failure. These effects were most profound among groups which we know struggle most with this treatment.”

The trial was carried out on more than 200 patients over 15 months in seven hospitals across the Netherlands.