You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 93, Issue 5
  • A double-edged sword: does highly active antiretroviral therapy contribute to syphilis incidence by impairing immunity to Treponema pallidum?

Responses

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Review
A double-edged sword: does highly active antiretroviral therapy contribute to syphilis incidence by impairing immunity to Treponema pallidum?
Compose a Response to This Article
Compose Response

More information about text formats

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Author Information
First or given name, e.g. 'Peter'.
Your last, or family, name, e.g. 'MacMoody'.
Your email address, e.g. higgs-boson@gmail.com
Your role and/or occupation, e.g. 'Orthopedic Surgeon'.
Your organization or institution (if applicable), e.g. 'Royal Free Hospital'.
Statement of Competing Interests

PLEASE NOTE:

  • A rapid response is a moderated but not peer reviewed online response to a published article in a BMJ journal; it will not receive a DOI and will not be indexed unless it is also republished as a Letter, Correspondence or as other content. Find out more about rapid responses.
  • We intend to post all responses which are approved by the Editor, within 14 days (BMJ Journals) or 24 hours (The BMJ), however timeframes cannot be guaranteed. Responses must comply with our requirements and should contribute substantially to the topic, but it is at our absolute discretion whether we publish a response, and we reserve the right to edit or remove responses before and after publication and also republish some or all in other BMJ publications, including third party local editions in other countries and languages
  • Our requirements are stated in our rapid response terms and conditions and must be read. These include ensuring that: i) you do not include any illustrative content including tables and graphs, ii) you do not include any information that includes specifics about any patients,iii) you do not include any original data, unless it has already been published in a peer reviewed journal and you have included a reference, iv) your response is lawful, not defamatory, original and accurate, v) you declare any competing interests, vi) you understand that your name and other personal details set out in our rapid response terms and conditions will be published with any responses we publish and vii) you understand that once a response is published, we may continue to publish your response and/or edit or remove it in the future.
  • By submitting this rapid response you are agreeing to our terms and conditions for rapid responses and understand that your personal data will be processed in accordance with those terms and our privacy notice.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Vertical Tabs

Other responses

Jump to comment:

  • Published on: 20 July 2017
    Data from the iPrEx Trial Does Not Support This Hypothesis
    • David V. Glidden, Professor University of California, San Francisco
    • Other Contributors:
      • Kenneth H. Mayer, Medical Director and Co-Chair
      • Robert M. Grant, Betty Jean and Hiro Ozawa Endowed Investigator

    The authors impute a biological mechanism to the high incidence of syphilis in men who have sex with men using anti-retroviral drugs (in particular, HAART). We suggest, empiric data do not support the biological hypothesis, and behavioral explanations (i.e. increased condomless sex and selection of higher risk partners) are supported by stronger evidence.

    Randomized double-blind trials of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention [1] provide a rigorous test of the author’s hypothesis. The methodological strength includes an unconfounded and clearly unexposed control group and an exposed group which received an agent that would putatively increase susceptibility — tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) co-formulated with emtricitabine (FTC). A unique feature is that these trials were blinded and PrEP was unproven that the time trials were undertaken; hence, we would not expect that the TDF/FTC-exposed group would adopt higher risk practices.

    An analysis of the iPrEx trial [2], a randomized PrEP trial in men who have sex with men/trans women, found [1] a relative rate of syphilis acquisition for TDF/FTC of 1.14 with a 0.95 confidence interval (0.90 to 1.45) compared to placebo. Incident syphilis, can be difficult to differentiate from a previous infection. Among those with a negative rapid plasma reagin titer at screening the relative rate of an on-study infection was 1.03, 0.95 CI (0.76 to 1.38). Adherence, was low in the iPrEx study and when pharmaco...

    Show More
    Conflict of Interest:
    None declared.