Which Are The Easiest Drug Combinations? (A Look At Fewer Pills and Once-A-Day Dosing) en español
Reducing the Number of Pills
What about fewer pills taken on a daily basis? While some people would prefer to take a handful of pills once a day, there are also people who would prefer to take only a few pills twice a day. Fortunately, this has been a productive area of research for pharmaceutical companies – many drugs involve fewer pills today than when they first became available:
Drugs that now require fewer pills (officially approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration)
*Lopinavir has never been available for use, alone, without the addition of Norvir. As a result, it is not known how many pills of lopinavir and ritonavir would have been necessary if they were to be used together as individual drugs.
If it's fewer pills you're after, there are still some issues that you'll need to consider with your healthcare provider before deciding that less really is more:
Remember potency: Individual drugs or drug combinations that involve the fewest number of pills may not be for everyone. For example, Atripla™ – a tablet that contains the nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitorsViread® and Emtriva®, along with the non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitorSustiva® – is the first approved one-pill-once-daily complete drug regimen. For people starting HIV treatment for the first time, Atripla is, perhaps, the "ultimate" simplified drug regimen. But for people who have tried and failed other anti-HIV drugs in the past, particularly drugs that may confer cross-resistance to any of the drugs in Atripla, the use of this fixed-dose combination tablet (without the use of other anti-HIV drugs) may not be the best drug combination to use.
Think about side effects: There is also the issue of side effects to consider. Simply because one drug only requires one or two pills daily, whereas another requires taking four or more pill on a daily basis, does not necessarily mean that it has fewer side effects. For example, Sustiva, a one-tablet non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor that only needs to be taken once a day is just as likely to cause short-term (and possibly long-term) side effects as Lexiva, a protease inhibitor that involves taking four tablets a day. In other words, fewer pills should not be interpreted to mean fewer side effects.
Now let's look at each anti-HIV drug, and how it might be simplified...
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