Are people with HIV sticking to their medication treatment regimens? New method measures patient...( n is critical especially for patients ...),Health

n is critical, especially for patients with HIV,where skipped doses can quickly lead to the virus becoming resistant to the medication, said Dr. Honghu Liu, lead study author and associate professor, UCLA Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research. HIV treatments consist of complicated drug regimens, involving many medications taken multiple times each day. As with other chronic diseases, patient adherence plays a major role in successful treatment.

According to Liu, patient adherence is tough to measure. Each of the currently available adherence measures has its own problems either over- or underestimating a patients true adherence.

Thisstudy is one of the first with a very rigorous design, aimed to measure adherence in multiple ways over an extended period of time, Liu said. We then link the adherence measurements to a clinical outcome the amount of HIV found in the patients blood.

The level of non-adherence among the patients in this study is of concern to both the patients and their clinicians, said Dr. Neil Wenger, study co-investigator and UCLA associate professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research.

The next step, according to Wenger, will be to transform these findings into better, more practical tools to monitor patient adherence. Better adherence measurements can then lead to better interventions to improve adherence and clinical outcomes.

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Contact: Rachel Champeau
rchampeau@support.ucla.edu
310-794-2270
University of California - Los Angeles
13-May-2001

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