Patients on Salvage Therapy Fare as Well as Those Beginning HAART

P atients taking several anti-HIV drugs as salvage therapy live just as long as treatment-naive patients who are just staring a first antiretroviral regimen, according to a study in the June 23 online edition of The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Researchers in Vancouver, Canada, followed 341 patients on salvage therapy and 1,047 treatment-naive patients for three years. While the patients on multidrug salvage therapy had lower CD4-cell counts and higher viral loads than treatment-naive study subjects, the death rates were not statistically different between the two groups . The key to successful salvage therapy, the researchers wrote, is the ability to closely adhere to the multidrug regimen, which held viral loads low and maintained CD4-cell counts over 200 in the study subjects.