CHICAGO – A four-drug cocktail isn’t any better for treating newly diagnosed HIV infection than the standard three-drug regimen, according to a study that followed 765 patients for three years.
The finding is welcome news to patient advocates, despite the lack of a step forward in treatment. Adding a fourth drug would have raised costs in an already overburdened system in which some states report waiting lists of uninsured patients who need help paying for their HIV drugs.
The annual cost per person for antiretroviral drug therapy in 2001 was about $11,000 a year, according to a previous study.
Murray Penner of the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors estimated that adding more drugs to already complex regimens could cost health systems millions of dollars more.
“Keeping treatment regimens as simple as possible is also good news for people living with HIV-AIDS as adherence (taking drugs as prescribed) is better with easier and smaller regimens,” Penner said.
Adding a drug to the cocktail also could increase side effects, said Jim Pickett of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago.
“Triple drug therapy has been the standard approach to treatment of HIV infection for a decade or so, but there’s always been a question about whether we could do better with more drugs,” said study co-author Dr. Dan Kuritzkes of Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Researchers found that the four-drug cocktail, which added the HIV drug abacavir, had no advantage in reducing the amount of virus in patients’ blood. It also didn’t increase levels of CD4 cells that fight infection.
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