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stopping meds and half life
Nov 26, 2007
I have heard that when planning to stop meds a peson has to figure out the half lives of the medications to prevent any possible mutations. Given this, what would be the best way to go about stopping truvada and nevirapine?
thanks
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Response from Dr. Daar
Thank you for your posting.
The issue you raise is fairly specific to stopping NNRTIs, such as nevirapine and is most relevant if viral load is undetectable at the time treatment is to be stopped. If viral load is not undetectable then it probably is okay to stop all drugs at the same time. If viral load is undetectable the concern is that if you stop all drugs at the same time the components of truvada may decline with persistence of nevirapine levels for several more days. Frankly, these issues are probably best described with NRTIs other than truvada and it is not clear that they are as relevant when truvada is part of the regimen.
In any event, if we assume this remains an issue we unfortunately do not have good studies to address this issue. Consequently, we are left with some general recommendations. In my view, the safest thing to do is change the nevirapine to a protease inhibitor for approximately 4 weeks and then stop all of the drugs at the same time. An alternative approach would be to stop the nevirapine approximately one week before stopping the truvada, recognizing that we are not certain that this is the right duration of time between stopping nevirapine and truvada.
Since there are not definitive answers I strongly suggest you discuss this in detail with your provider prior to stopping any part of your regimen.
Best,
Eric
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