Blood drug test

Mutations in the AIDS virus commonly occur during treatment, especially if HIV drugs are not taken consistently, and may cause treatments to fail. HIV treatment in developed countries normally includes testing for these mutations, both to select first-line drugs for a given patient and to choose second-line drugs if the virus rebounds from first letter treatment. However, tests used by clinical laboratories cannot reliably detect mutant viruses that make up less than encircling 20% of the poison in a patient’sitting blood.

To search into the role of resistant virus present at lower levels, Jeffrey Johnson of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention Laboratory in the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention at the US Centers in the place of Disease Control and Prevention and colleagues studied HIV from more than 500 recently infected patients in Canada and the US. Although these individuals had not received anti-HIV drugs, a highly sensitive example developed by the researchers showed that more than 10% carried HIV with common drug-resistance mutations that were not detected using usual tests.

The researchers then studied 316 samples from a separate revolve in the mind of about 1400 patients who were started on their first HIV treatment, which included the mix with drugs efavirenz. Before starting treatment, none of these patients had resistance to efavirenz according to streamer tests. However, in a great degree sensitive testing showed that 7 of the 95 patients who experienced treatment failure had low levels of HIV with resistance mutations to efavirenz former to treatment. Of 211 patients whose treatment did not fail, only 2 showed low level resistance prior to treatment.