REGULAR INTAKE OF MEDICINE "ADHERANCE" IMPROVED HIV PATIENTS-THE LANCET STUDY


PROF .DRRAM,HIV /AIDS,HEPATITIS ,SEX DISEASES & WEAKNESS expert,New Delhi,India, profdrram@gmail.com,+917838059592,+919832025033,ON WHATSAPP

A new dtudy has been published in The Lancet - Infectious Diseases, the breakthrough deals with how patients take their medication and adhere to regimes, as too many face irregular regimes or discontinue medication.A new program or better patient assistance was designed by University of Aberdeen and Academic Medical Centre (Amsterdam) teams. University of Aberdeen Professor, Marjin de Bruin, stated ‘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 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 suboptimal. We designed a programme in such a way that it 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 in turn reducing treatment failure. Importantly, these effects were most profound amongst patient groups from which we know struggle most with this treatment. As well as important for patients’ own health, having a very low viral load means that people are extremely unlikely to transmit the virus to other people. So not only is this a significant improvement to individual patients’ health, it is also important for public health because it may help to curb the pandemic by interrupting the transmission of the virus. That the intervention also saved money rather than required extra resources was unexpected, and strongly suggested that introducing this programme in routine HIV care is beneficial for patients and safety. It is very important to note that the medication non-adherence is very common with long and short-term treatments for many conditions, often contributing to poor patient outcomes and increased health care expenditure. We will therefore seek to adapt and test the benefits of this intervention in a range of other chronic condition.’