The PROUD study: access to PrEP in the UK to prevent HIV

21 October 2014. Related: Activism, Research studies.

At the end of last week I posted two new articles on the i-Base website.

The first was an announcement about changes to the PROUD study. The second was a Q&A page about the change and about PrEP in the UK,

This was important news for three reasons.

This was a significant change to an ongoing study. It was based on a recommendation from a safety monitoring board. The decision to change a study like this is unusual and have to be taken very seriously. The recommendation was that PrEP should now be made available to everyone in the study.
The PROUD study found PrEP significantly reduced the risk of catching HIV. Other studies have reported this before, of course. This is why PrEP is already available in the US. The difference is that PROUD was not designed to show whether PrEP worked. The study was too small to be expected to see this.
For PROUD to find PrEP worked meant that it was considerably MORE effective in this study than was expected. We don’t know why because results have still to be analysed.
This is a UK study that shows that PrEP is highly protective in gay, bisexual and trans* men who were already at high risk for catching HIV. From an activist perspective it increases the pressure for the NHS to make this available.

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