Children With HIV Fail to Achieve Viral Suppression: Lancet

Children and adolescents unable to achieve viral suppression. However, people with HIV who achieve viral suppression protect their immune health and prevent transmitting HIV to others.

Antiretroviral therapy (ART) given to children and adolescents with HIV, fail to achieve durable viral suppression. However, in adults with HIV, nearly 95 percent viral suppression is achieved, reveals a study led by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). //

People with HIV who achieve viral suppression protect their immune health and prevent transmitting HIV to others.

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‘Viral suppression is extremely important to protect the immune health of the people with HIV and to prevent transmitting HIV to others.’

The researchers estimated that among adults, 79 percent were virally suppressed after one year of ART, 72 percent after two years, and 65 percent after three years.

Among children and adolescents, 64 percent were virally suppressed after one year of ART, 62 percent after two years, and 59 percent after three years. The findings were published in the journal The Lancet HIV.

"These viral suppression rates illustrate how much farther global HIV treatment programmes need to go to reach and sustain the UNAIDS 2030 targets," said Win Min Han, student-researcher at the Kirby Institute of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

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"Importantly, the even lower rates of viral suppression among children and adolescents with HIV underscore the need to improve approaches for achieving durable viral suppression in these age groups," Min Han added.

In 2014, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) set a goal of 95 percent of all people with HIV who are taking ART achieving viral suppression by 2030.

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Scientists from the NIH-funded International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) consortium set out in 2020 to estimate how close the world is to achieving that goal.

The team analyzed data from 148 IeDEA treatment sites in 31 countries on five continents to estimate the proportions of children, adolescents, and adults who were virally suppressed one, two, and three years after initiating ART.

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The data came from more than 21,500 children and adolescents with HIV aged 17 years or younger and more than 255,000 adults with HIV, all of whom had begun receiving ART between 2010 and 2019. Viral suppression was defined as having fewer than 1,000 copies of HIV per milliliter of blood.

The researchers calculated the percentages of children and adults who were virally suppressed based on data from those who were alive, in follow-up, and had viral load measurements for up to three years of ART.

Source-IANS