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Greetings, good evening. This is my second youtube video.

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Tonight i'm wanting to talk a little bit about a study I recently read.

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As I mentioned in my

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other video and

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blogs I quit my AIDS drugs about six years ago,

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so i find reports like this of great interest.
The study is called LOTTI

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and that's L-O-T-T-I,

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stands for LOng-Term Treatment Interruption.

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The study recently reported that those of us who have had success with treatment interuptions,

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or "vacations"

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might not be all that unusual

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There are two groups in the study which was done in Italy.

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They were all

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patients taking

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HAART, Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy

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or the "AIDS cocktails"

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and one group took the drugs continuously—that was one arm—the second arm

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took vacations, or interrupted their therapy,

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based on CD4 counts.

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The counts used in this study

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were 700...

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at 700 CD4 count

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patients on the STI (structured treatment interruption) arm could

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quit their drugs until their CD4 count dropped to

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350 or lower, at which time they

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would restart

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their drug treatment.

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What was really cool about this study is that

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over a fourth of the
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patients in the STI arm,

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when they

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quit their drugs, they never had to restart,

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which has been my strategy since I quit the drugs six years ago.

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Though i would use a little bit different numbers for the CD4 counts,perhaps.

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The study

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really offers hope to people who are either taking, or facing

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the choice of taking antiretroviral drugs

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because of their concern for long-term effects or perhaps they are experiencing illness

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because of the toxicities.

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There really are no good reasons

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for HAART patientsto stay on the drugs continuously

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and indefinitely and there are several advantages
to stopping them.

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There is reduced toxicity

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There were more cardiologicalproblems due to the effects of drug toxicity

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in the continuous arm

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than there were in the STI arm.

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And these problems

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are well-known. The modern clinical practice is to simply prescribed

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even more

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drugs

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to deal with the effects.

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The other

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known affect of

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continuous

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HAART drug use includes disfiguring body effects

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like lipdystrophy,

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liver disease, bone problems, and aberrant blood levels

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with lipids, enzymes and hormones.

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The big boogie man most frequently used to try to discourage

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patients from interrupting their HAART treatment

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is drug resistance.

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The LOTTI study

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found that

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drug resistance was higher in the continuous group.

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than it was in the STI group.

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In other words, being

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off the drugs didn't cause resistence, but being on them did.

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There is only one patient in the STI arm who developed resistance

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and that was while they were taking the drug, supposedly after achieving viral suppression.

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So this really contradicts the

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common wisdom that's usually heard

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in the doctor's offices.

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CD4counts.

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While about the same number of patients in each arm reached one of the so-called primary endpoints,

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which in this study

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was defined as death or disease those in the contiuous arm had a mean CD4 count of

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891, almost 900,

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compared to 557 in the STI arm.o

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So, having higher

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level of CD4 counts, in this study at any rate,

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did not result in lowering

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either death or disease. So much for the

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protective power of high CD4 counts.

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The daily drug costs...

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treatment cost for patients on the STI arm

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was less than half that of the continuous drug group.

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Now, cost alone should never be

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the determining factor in treatment choices,

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but there never seems to be enough money

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to fuel the AIDS machine, so

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this is an important finding too.

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The other study that's or

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pretty widely quoted when

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drug vacations or structured treatment
interruptions are

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mentioned,

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is the SMART study, which was funded

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by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

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This was an international study with over 5400 patients

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in 33 countries. The study was terminated early

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because supposedly of too many deaths and adverse affects. What's really strange

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about this study is that

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79 of those 85 deaths

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occurred in the U.S.

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even those only 55% of the patients in the study were from the U.S.

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These and other weird aberrations about this study are mentioned in a link

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that is in my report on the LOTTI study on my blog,

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which I hope

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you'll go and actually look at the study itself, and I write a little bit more

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about LOTTI

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and raise questions about why isn't this

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information being

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more widely publicized.

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You won't find

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any promotion of of the

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information from LOTTIon the pharmaceutical funded

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AIDS sites like AIDS.com...

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AIDSmeds.com, poz.com.

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thebody.com...

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which is which is just

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inexcusable to me.

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I know of friends and other people who are on HAART,

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and i support their choices in the decision to take

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those drugs.

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My point is that

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decisions...

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we need information

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to make informed decisions.

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This is important information that every person

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who is facing

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this choice should have.

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I know people who are

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having problems with the drugs but are

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scared to death, basically, to quit

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and

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we need more

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of this type of encouragement

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that there's really not...

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there's not as much to lose

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to give it a try now and it doesn't work, you can go back on the drugs.

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If it does,

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you might never have to

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go back on them.

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That's my hope, at any rate

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Go check out the blog. Its

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resistanceisfruitful.com (new URL)

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There's a link to in on the youtube page here.

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Read the study, read my report, feel free to comment.

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Thanks.