Michael Mugavero, M.D., UAB associate professor of Medicine and director of the Clinical Core of the UAB Center for AIDS Research, served on an expert panel for The International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care to develop HIV adherence guidelines. The “Guidelines for Improving Entry into and Retention in Care and Antiretroviral Adherence for Persons with HIV” were published online by the Annals of Internal Medicine March 5, 2012.
Jointly sponsored by the IAPAC and the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Office of AIDS Research, the guidelines offer actionable steps for HIV service providers to take with the goal of getting HIV-positive patients into care and retaining them.
“While we long have had HIV testing and retroviral treatment guidelines in terms of what drugs to use, there has never been a formal guidance in HIV for adherence, so this has been a long time coming,” explains Mugavero, who is the second author on the paper.
“The guidelines focus on adherence in a broader context, emphasizing adherence to medical care and medication adherence, and they are entirely evidence-based, there’s no opinion. It’s important that there is science to support all of the guidelines in this document,” says Mugavero.