Although isoniazid preventive therapy (IPT) is highly effective, the rate of its use has been “appallingly poor,” Dr. Chaisson said.
“There’s a sense of futility amongst clinicians around the world, that they’re not going to even bother with giving TB-preventive therapy,” he commented.
Neil Osterweil/Frontline Medical News
Dr. Richard Chaisson
Dr. Chaisson and coinvestigators conducted a randomized trial to test the hypothesis that 4 weeks of daily rifapentine and isoniazid would be noninferior to 9 months of isoniazid for TB prevention in person with HIV infection.
In a multicenter open-label trial, they enrolled 3,000 HIV-infected people aged 13 years and older from 45 sites in 10 countries. The patients had no evidence of active TB, but had either tuberculin skin test (TST) reactivity of 5 mm or greater and/or a positive interferon gamma release assay (IGRA), or lived in a high–TB burden area (prevalence of 60 or more cases per 100,000 population).