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September 30, 2009

Need for Perfect Adherence Might Drop After a Year on Treatment

"The need to maintain near-perfect adherence to antiretroviral (ARV) therapy might decrease the longer a person is able to keep virus suppressed, according to a study published September 29 in the online journal PLoS One.

"Though seriously potent, ARV treatment has a major Achilles’ heel—the virus can easily develop resistant to the drugs if they aren’t taken on time as prescribed every day. Previous estimates of the older drugs found that people shouldn’t miss more than one dose per month if they were on a once-daily regimen. Though some researchers have said they think the newest drugs might be a tad more forgiving than that, they still argue that high levels of adherence are key to long-term treatment success.

"Some researchers, however, including Michael Rosenblum, PhD, from the University of California at San Francisco, and his colleagues have suspected that the need for near-perfect adherence might decrease the longer a person successfully maintained very low levels of HIV. ..."

Read more in POZ, September 30, 2009.

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