Incidence, prevalence and outcome of extensive virologic failure in over 60,000 patients with HIV (PLATO ll)

世界上有4000多万人感染了艾滋病毒。大约有250万人正在接受药物治疗。越来越多的人得到了这些药物，特别是在非洲，那里的艾滋病毒感染者比例非常高。当这些药物联合服用时，是否能有效地阻止HIV病毒在人体内繁殖？年代的身体。当这种情况发生时，艾滋病毒感染者往往会好转，患艾滋病的风险也会降低。然而，不幸的是，由于病毒对它们产生了耐药性，一些药物失去了功效。当这种情况发生时，医生会把药物换成仍然有效的药物。到目前为止，我们现有的药物主要属于三类之一。有些病人已经用尽了所有的药物，这三类药物中已经没有剩下的药物对他们的病毒有效了。虽然我们知道会发生这种情况，但我们不知道？我知道有多快。了解这一点对我们来说很重要，特别是因为非洲和其他发展中国家的艾滋病毒感染者除了这些药物之外无法获得任何药物。没有更多药物可以控制病毒的患者最终会发展成艾滋病并死亡。在像英国这样的发达国家，我们有三种新药。这意味着最初的药物治疗失败的人可能仍然有药物选择来控制他们的病毒。但我们对这些药物了解不多，因为它们是非常新的。很可能病毒最终也会对这些新药产生抗药性。到那时，发达国家的病人也将面临艾滋病和死亡的严重危险。我们的项目将汇集欧洲6万多名艾滋病毒感染者的数据，以检验所有可用药物失效需要多长时间，以及发生这种情况的患者会发生什么。除了对医生和他们的病人很重要之外，我们的研究还可能帮助那些计划未来医疗保健服务的人，那些计划开发新药的人，以及其他正在考虑对这类病人进行新研究的研究人员。

Over 40 million people in the world have HIV infection. Around 2.5 million are being given drugs to combat the infection. More and more people are being given these drugs, particularly in Africa where the proportion of people with HIV is very high. When taken in combination these drugs are effective at stopping the HIV virus from reproducing itself in a person?s body. When this happens people with HIV tend to get better and are at less risk of getting sick with an AIDS disease. Unfortunately, however, some drugs lose their benefit because the virus develops resistance to them. When this happens, doctors will change the drugs to ones that should still work. So far, the drugs we have available mainly belong to one of three classes. Some patients have reached a point where they have used up all the drugs and there are no drugs left in these three classes that are effective against their virus. While we know this happens, we don?t know how rapidly. This is important for us to understand, particularly because people with HIV in Africa and other developing countries do not have access to any drugs apart from these. Patients who have no more drugs available to control their virus will eventually develop AIDS and die. In developed countries like the UK, we have three newer drug classes available. This means that the people who have failed the original drugs may still have drug options left to control their virus. But we do not know much about these drugs as they are very new. It is likely that the virus will often eventually become resistant to these new drugs also. At that point patients in developed countries would also be in severe danger of AIDS and death. Our project will bring together data from over 60,000 people with HIV in Europe in order to examine how long it takes before all available drugs have stopped working, and what happens to patients for whom this has occurred. Besides obviously being important for doctors and their patients our research is likely to help those planning future health care services, those planning to try to develop new drugs and other researchers that are thinking of new studies to do in these kinds of patients.