After two and a half years of trials, a new study has found no new HIV infections among a group of people on pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), reports HIV Plus magazine.
For 32 months, researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco tracked the health of over 600 people as they used Truvada daily to prevent the virus in a real-world setting.
The average age of the study participants was 37, and 99 percent were men who have sex with men. The average length of individual usage was 7.2 months. Members of this group also reported a higher likelihood of having multiple sex partners than those not using PrEP.
No one in the study contracted HIV.
Lead author Jonathan Volk, a physician at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco said, “Our study is the first to extend the understanding of the use of PrEP in a real-world setting and suggests that the treatment may prevent new HIV infections even in a high-risk setting,” he said in a press release. “Until now, evidence supporting the efficacy of PrEP to prevent HIV infection had come from clinical trials and a demonstration project.”
The findings were published Wednesday in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
