Is HIV Treatment Failure Disappearing?

In the current HIV treatment era, only a small proportion of patients will experience virologic failure of drugs from all three original antiretroviral classes (nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, and protease inhibitors). In the present study, researchers evaluated how outcomes among such patients have changed over the course of the last decade.

The researchers reviewed data from more than 90,000 patients in 24 European cohorts — and identified 2709 who started potent combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) after 1998 and experienced triple-class virologic failure between 2000 and 2009.

The proportion of patients who achieved viral loads <50 copies/mL after triple-class virologic fail…