Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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United Press International - Thursday, February 04, 1999
Ed Susman
"These strains can be found in cities across the country," said Dr. Susan Little of the University of California, San Diego, at the 6th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Chicago.
Little found resistant strains against all three major classes of antiretroviral drugs: nucleoside analogs, non-nucleoside analogs and protease inhibitors. Each class attacks different parts of the AIDS virus, making it more difficult to mutate and become resistant.
But now Little and Dr. Scott Wegner, chief of the clinical studies division at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Bethesda, Md., have found that 20 percent to 28 percent of newly infected patients are infected with resistant strains of the disease.
They also found that the most frequently found resistance is to non- nucleoside analogs, which, surprisingly, are the newest class of anti- AIDS drugs to reach the market.
Dr. John Baxter of Cooper Hospital, University Medical Center, Camden, N.J., said demonstrated in his study shows that if doctors test patient's virus for resistance then it is possible to select a better and more effective choice of treatment for patients.
Wegner, reporting on new HIV infections among Army personnel, said he determined that about 25 of 114 patients had resistant virus. Little performed testing on 69 subjects from five cities, San Diego, Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver and Boston. She found resistant strains of the virus in 19 of the patients -- about 28 percent.
Wegner said, "The substantial prevalence of drug resistance in this group of patients who have no previous experience with antiretroviral drugs suggests resistance testing prior to starting treatment may be useful to optimize initial therapy."
Dr. John Mellors, an AIDS investigator at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the conference organizers, said that while resistant strains are being transmitted from person to person, he thinks the extent of which the resistance occurs is more realistically between 5 and 10 percent in the United States.
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