Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2007. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
United Press International - August 31, 2007
The study, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, examined low-income urban residents -- recruited from homeless shelters, free food programs and single-room occupancy hotels -- living with HIV infection.
"Clinicians and pharmacists can meaningfully improve treatment outcomes with simple and inexpensive strategies, such as pill box organizers, to help people organize how they take medication," senior author Dr. David Bangsberg of the University of California, San Francisco, said in a statement.
Incomplete adherence to HIV therapy is the most common cause of incomplete viral suppression, drug resistance, disease progression and death among people living with HIV/AIDS. The researchers made 3,170 unannounced visits every three to six weeks to the subjects' places of residence to compare the number of pills remaining to the number expected to remain if patients followed treatment regimens perfectly.
Pill box organizers were associated with a 4 percent improvement in adherence, 0.12 log reduction in HIV viral loa, and an estimated 11 percent reduction in the risk of progression to clinical AIDS.
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