Greetings, good evening. This is my second youtube video.
Tonight i'm wanting to talk a little bit about a study I recently read.
As I mentioned in my
other video and
blogs I quit my AIDS drugs about six years ago,
so i find reports like this of great interest. The study is called LOTTI
and that's L-O-T-T-I,
stands for LOng-Term Treatment Interruption.
The study recently reported that those of us who have had success with treatment interuptions,
or "vacations"
might not be all that unusual
There are two groups in the study which was done in Italy.
They were all
patients taking
HAART, Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy
or the "AIDS cocktails"
and one group took the drugs continuously—that was one arm—the second arm
took vacations, or interrupted their therapy,
based on CD4 counts.
The counts used in this study
were 700...
at 700 CD4 count
patients on the STI (structured treatment interruption) arm could
quit their drugs until their CD4 count dropped to
350 or lower, at which time they
would restart
their drug treatment.
What was really cool about this study is that
over a fourth of the 0:01:32.440,0:01:34.870 patients in the STI arm,
when they
quit their drugs, they never had to restart,
which has been my strategy since I quit the drugs six years ago.
Though i would use a little bit different numbers for the CD4 counts,perhaps.
The study
really offers hope to people who are either taking, or facing
the choice of taking antiretroviral drugs
because of their concern for long-term effects or perhaps they are experiencing illness
because of the toxicities.
There really are no good reasons
for HAART patientsto stay on the drugs continuously
and indefinitely and there are several advantages to stopping them.
There is reduced toxicity
There were more cardiologicalproblems due to the effects of drug toxicity
in the continuous arm
than there were in the STI arm.
And these problems
are well-known. The modern clinical practice is to simply prescribed
even more
drugs
to deal with the effects.
The other
known affect of
continuous
HAART drug use includes disfiguring body effects
like lipdystrophy,
liver disease, bone problems, and aberrant blood levels
with lipids, enzymes and hormones.
The big boogie man most frequently used to try to discourage
patients from interrupting their HAART treatment
is drug resistance.
The LOTTI study
found that
drug resistance was higher in the continuous group.
than it was in the STI group.
In other words, being
off the drugs didn't cause resistence, but being on them did.
There is only one patient in the STI arm who developed resistance
and that was while they were taking the drug, supposedly after achieving viral suppression.
So this really contradicts the
common wisdom that's usually heard
in the doctor's offices.
CD4counts.
While about the same number of patients in each arm reached one of the so-called primary endpoints,
which in this study
was defined as death or disease those in the contiuous arm had a mean CD4 count of
891, almost 900,
compared to 557 in the STI arm.o
So, having higher
level of CD4 counts, in this study at any rate,
did not result in lowering
either death or disease. So much for the
protective power of high CD4 counts.
The daily drug costs...
treatment cost for patients on the STI arm
was less than half that of the continuous drug group.
Now, cost alone should never be
the determining factor in treatment choices,
but there never seems to be enough money
to fuel the AIDS machine, so
this is an important finding too.
The other study that's or
pretty widely quoted when
drug vacations or structured treatment interruptions are
mentioned,
is the SMART study, which was funded
by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
This was an international study with over 5400 patients
in 33 countries. The study was terminated early
because supposedly of too many deaths and adverse affects. What's really strange
about this study is that
79 of those 85 deaths
occurred in the U.S.
even those only 55% of the patients in the study were from the U.S.
These and other weird aberrations about this study are mentioned in a link
that is in my report on the LOTTI study on my blog,
which I hope
you'll go and actually look at the study itself, and I write a little bit more
about LOTTI
and raise questions about why isn't this
information being
more widely publicized.
You won't find
any promotion of of the
information from LOTTIon the pharmaceutical funded
AIDS sites like AIDS.com...
AIDSmeds.com, poz.com.
thebody.com...
which is which is just
inexcusable to me.
I know of friends and other people who are on HAART,
and i support their choices in the decision to take
those drugs.
My point is that
decisions...
we need information
to make informed decisions.
This is important information that every person
who is facing
this choice should have.
I know people who are
having problems with the drugs but are
scared to death, basically, to quit
and
we need more
of this type of encouragement
that there's really not...
there's not as much to lose
to give it a try now and it doesn't work, you can go back on the drugs.
If it does,
you might never have to
go back on them.
That's my hope, at any rate
Go check out the blog. Its
resistanceisfruitful.com (new URL)
There's a link to in on the youtube page here.
Read the study, read my report, feel free to comment.
Thanks.