Antiretroviral Resistance Testing Interpretation Guidelines |
Resistance testing has become the standard of care as part of an overall strategy for evaluating and treating treatment failures. It has a growing role in planning initial therapy for patients who have a higher risk of harboring a resistant strain of HIV. Certainly resistance testing is an incredibly useful epidemiological tool for determining the prevalence of resistant HIV in communities where resistant HIV may be transmitted from person to person.
Resistance testing should be performed prior to beginning treatment and whenever treatment failure and poor HIV RNA suppression are evident.
Resistance testing is available in at least two distinct forms as discussed under Laboratory Evaluation of HIV.
There is also basic resistance information discussed in each drug section and summary (NRTI, NNRTI, PI, FI)
The Stanford University HIV Drug Resistance Database is by far the most useful site.
The clinician simply enters the drug mutations that are seen on the summation of all the patient's previous HIV genotypes.
Updated 1/27/2013