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Drug treatment effective in HIV babies

Combinations of anti-AIDS drugs given to adults infected with HIV can also be effective in newborns, in whom the virus tends to be more aggressive, a new report finds.
/ Source: Reuters

Combinations of anti-AIDS drugs given to adults infected with HIV can also be effective in newborns, in whom the virus tends to be more aggressive, according to a new report Wednesday.

The finding may help guide HIV treatment in the youngest children as more than 2,000 babies are born each day with the virus, 90 percent of them in developing countries.

Current U.S. guidelines only suggest multi-drug treatment for children under 1 who have been infected with the AIDS virus but have no signs or symptoms of the disease.

The new study in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, and other research, “provide increasing evidence that several regimens of antiretroviral therapy are safe, effective, and well tolerated during years of administration when started in infancy,” said Katherine Luzuriaga of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

Lower virus levels
The report used data from 25 medical centers in the United States and Puerto Rico.

It found that babies who started the multi-drug treatment before they were 3 months old were twice as likely to have low levels of the AIDS virus in their blood after nearly four years compared with babies who began later.

Three different combinations of drugs were tested on the children.

There have been suggestions that intensive treatment during the first year of life could make HIV easier to treat later on. The Luzuriaga group found no evidence to support that and reported the virus seemed able to fight back aggressively at any time.