Antiretroviral Treatment Failure and Its Types Among Patients on Follow up at Zewditu Memorial Hospital, ART Clinic, Ethiopia: A Retrospective Study

Abstract

Free antiretroviral therapy (ART) began in Ethiopia in March 2005 at Zewditu Memorial Hospital (ZMH) with technical assistance from Johns Hopkins University. Currently ZMH is the largest HIV clinic in the country providing HIV/AIDS treatment and care to more than 14,000 patients; of these 10,000 patients have started ART treatment. Though a significant number of the patients are responding to treatment, few patients have experienced treatment failure on first-line regimen and subsequently switched to second-line regimen. The objective of this study was to investigate the prevalence and the types of antiretroviral treatment failure among patients receiving antiretroviral therapy at ZMH. Using data abstraction format, demographic data, the type of treatment failure and the WHO staging of the disease were recorded for patients who were under treatment in different years starting from 01 January 2006 to 31 December 2011. The data were entered and analyzed using SPSS. The results indicated that the proportion of treatment failure to first-line ART in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were 2.12%, 1.40%, 1.10%, 0.73% , 0.88% and 0.16%, respectively. The major cause of ART failure was immunological (66%) followed by virologic (28.6%) and clinical failure (5.5%). In conclusion ART failure at ZMH is more prevalent in children than adults and the main type of treatment failure was found to be immunological. Keywords : antiretroviral treatment failure, prevalence and type, antiretroviral therapy clinic, Zewditu Memorial Hospital, Ethiopia,