Having a hidden infection with hepatitis B may undermine viral suppression after a switch to dolutegravir / lamivudine (Dovato), a study of people with HIV who simplified treatment in Italian and French clinics has concluded. The study investigators recommend careful monitoring of hepatitis B activity and HIV suppression in anyone with markers suggesting a hidden hepatitis B infection – antibodies to hepatitis B core antigen without corresponding antibodies to the hepatitis B surface antigen ..read more

A cohort of people with HIV who took NRTIs (a class of HIV drugs) as part of HIV treatment showed lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease than people without HIV. The team of American researchers behind this study published in the journal of Pharmaceuticals suspect HIV-like sequences in our genome to be associated with the disease and thus these HIV drugs protect against its development ..read more

Last month’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2024) included the latest information about potential drugs and treatments that might lead to a cure. Two presentations included promising data on TACK (targeted activation of cell kill). This is a property of some drugs in the non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase (NNRTI) family which induces a chain of events leading to the self-destruction of HIV-infected cells ..read more

Women living with HIV in West Bengal (an eastern state of India) face intersectional stigma due to HIV as well as their other marginalised identities such as being a widow or a sex worker. This impacts not only their mental health, but also their physical health and leads to poorer HIV treatment outcomes, according to a qualitative study published in PLOS Global Health by Dr Reshmi Mukerji of University College London and colleagues ..read more

Young people living with perinatally acquired HIV have a high prevalence of metabolic complications such as diabetes and raised cholesterol and require closer monitoring for long-term cardiovascular risk, a study of young adults in the United States has found. Although rates of perinatally acquired HIV have been falling for several decades around the world, approximately 2.5 million children and adolescents were estimated to be living with HIV in 2022, 90% in Africa and most with perinatally acquired HIV ..read more

HIV clinicians have issued a note of caution regarding long-acting injectable cabotegravir and rilpivirine in a recent commentary in AIDS. Dr Diego Ripamonti of the Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo and colleagues from the universities of Milan and Siena highlight that people with long treatment histories in particular may not be good candidates for the treatment, due to the substantial risk of developing resistance to the drugs should the treatment fail ..read more

Two recent statements about taking the antibiotic doxycycline up to 72 hours after sex to prevent bacterial sexually transmitted infections, a prevention intervention known as doxyPEP, are notably more cautious about recommending its use than the first guidelines from California ..read more

Switching from tenofovir alafenamide (TAF) to the older formulation of tenofovir disoproxil (TDF) resulted in modest weight loss in people with HIV in the Swiss HIV Cohort, researchers report in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Switching from TAF to TDF also brought benefits in the forms of reduced cholesterol and triglycerides. In contrast, switching from TAF-containing treatment to a two-drug combination of dolutegravir/lamivudine or injectable cabotegravir/rilpivirine did not lead to any changes in weight ..read more

A Danish study which was able to chart the annual incidence of the three bacterial STIs, chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis, in people attending sexual health clinics both before and after they started PrEP has found that they had more than twice as many (115% more) STI diagnoses while on PrEP than they had some time before starting it ..read more

A study of cryptococcal meningitis incidence in people with HIV in Botswana shows that incidence has halved since 2015 and that the decline is correlated to increased antiretroviral coverage. But the study found that men were more likely to be diagnosed with cryptococcal meningitis than women and that illness related to advanced HIV remains a substantial problem despite achieving near-universal treatment coverage ..read more