thesis
Optimizing Antiretroviral Therapy in Children and Adolescents with HIV Infection
- Publication date
- 21 December 2010
- Publisher
- HIV infection became a newly recognized disease in the mid 1980s. High morbidity
and mortality associated with it prompted the urgent development of new
therapeutic agents and combination therapies. Throughout the next 20 years the
hopes for cure have risen and fallen, and the vaccine research has failed to reach
the evasive target of HIV prevention. It is the development and optimization of
antiretroviral therapy (ART) that formed the roadmap for the universal control and
prevention of existing and new infections, respectively. As with any new therapeutic
modality, the data guiding the dosing, efficacy and safety of antiretroviral (ARV)
drugs for children have lagged substantially behind as compared to the information
available for adults. An advanced PubMed search for "HIV pharmacokinetics",
restricted to age groups of infant, child or adolescent, and all categories of original
clinical studies (e.g. excluding reviews and other publication types) resulted in 326
citations. Removing any age restriction increased the number of citations to 1404.
While one can argue about the absolute numbers and whether classification is
appropriate for all publications in the PubMed database, the ratio is nonetheless
significant and not surprising, with over four times as many pharmacokinetic (PK)
studies conducted in HIV-infected adults than in children.