HIV/AIDS News

Infants born to mothers with HIV but are not infected with the virus tend to be smaller at birth. However, research published in Clinical Infectious Diseases demonstrates that many HIV-exposed and uninfected, or HEU, children catch up in weight and length by early childhood.

Findings from two phase 3 trials published in The New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated that dolutegravir-based treatment for HIV is noninferior to efavirenz-based regimens, although dolutegravir was associated with excessive weight gain in both studies.

Among adults initiating ART, levels of pretreatment HIV drug resistance to two non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, or NNRTIs, exceeded 10% in 12 of 18 countries reporting data to WHO between 2014 and 2018, and resistance was particularly high in women, according to a new report.

According to results from the ongoing Tsepamo study in Botswana, infants born to women who took the integrase inhibitor dolutegravir for HIV infection from conception remained at an elevated risk for neural tube defects, with three in 1,000 born with these conditions. However, the findings, which were presented at the International AIDS Society Conference in Mexico City and published in The New England Journal of Medicine, showed that the risk is significantly lower than previously estimated.

Survey results suggested that nurse practitioners who work in offices where the staff is supportive of routine HIV screening are more likely screen patients for infection.

During his second State of the Union address, President Donald J. Trump announced a commitment to end the HIV epidemic in the United States in the next decade. This means cutting new HIV infections by at least 90% by 2030.

POINT. The federal government should sue Gilead to enforce its patents on PrEP and lower the price of the treatment.

In a recent study published in JAMA, researchers found that among a cohort of predominantly gay and bisexual men, the initiation of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, was linked with an increased incidence of STIs (adjusted incidence rate ratio = 1.12; 95% CI, 1.02-1.23). The study did not include a control group that did not receive PrEP, so researchers were unable to determine if PrEP initiation was the cause of the increase in STI risk. However, given the high degree of protection PrEP offers, some experts are concerned that patients may change their sexual risk behaviors and exacerbate the STI epidemic.

Adolescents who take pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for HIV prevention may experience a loss of bone mineral density during treatment. Most patients can experience partial or full recovery of BMD within 48 weeks after discontinuing the medication, but a recent study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases suggested that teens aged 15 to 19 years may not make a full recovery, especially in lumbar spine and whole body BMD Z-scores.

There was an estimated global total of 376.4 million new chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomoniasis and syphilis infections in men and women aged 15 to 49 years in 2016, averaging out to more than 1 million new infections daily, according to the latest WHO data.