Paul E. Sax, MD is the Editor-in-Chief, Journal Watch HIV/AIDS Clinical Care, Clinical Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
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(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)In a previous post, we reviewed the various flavors of medication non-adherence, and concluded with this tantalizing line: Next up: An Adherence Intervention that Actually Works — But There’s a Catch Well here it is, just published online in JAMA Internal Medicine. Dr. Robert Gross (a long-time HIV adherence researcher from U Penn) and colleagues [...]
(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)Treatment of HIV has become so amazingly effective that when it fails, it’s no overstatement to say that it’s usually because the patient is not taking the medications. There are all kinds of provider-related reasons for this — inadequate patient education, prescribing and dispensing errors, failure to address language or education deficits — but here [...]
(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)There has been an irresistable urge for people — doctors, public health officers, politicians, journalists, the usual pundits — to compare adherence to HIV treatment in resource-rich vs. resource-limited setting. I suspect this is because the whole issue got off to a famously bad start in 2001, when then-head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Andrew [...]
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)Some quick ID/HIV/other thoughts while we marvel in all that is Strasburgian: Did you know that HIV medication adherence improves over time? So much for “pill fatigue.” By the way, this anecdotally fits with my experience as well. And right now, the biggest reason for patients’ stopping their HIV meds is financial, usually due to loss of or [...]
(No Ratings Yet)One of the most important recent studies in HIV has just been “published” in (on?) PLoS ONE. It’s ACTG 5164, led by Andrew Zolopa, which compared “early” versus “deferred” antiretroviral therapy in 282 patients presenting with acute opportunistic infections. (Full disclosure: I am on the protocol study team — but am not an author on [...]
