About BREATHER Plus

Background:

The goal of HIV treatment is to make sure the amount of HIV virus in the blood remains very low. This is called having an undetectable viral load. If this goal is achieved and sustained life-long, then people living with HIV can live a healthy life, with a normal life expectancy. However, it is challenging to take medication every single day for life. This may be an even bigger challenge for teenagers living with HIV.

In BREATHER Plus we compared two different ways of taking HIV medicines that include the HIV medicine dolutegravir. We wanted to see if a similar proportion of young people in the Short Cycle Therapy group had low HIV virus as in the Continuous Treatment group and whether they found there are other benefits to having two days off treatment each week:

• Short Cycle Therapy: where people who took part took all their HIV medicines during the week but stopped taking them at weekends (either Friday and Saturday or Saturday and Sunday)

• Continuous Treatment: where people who took part took all their HIV medicines every day without any interruptions

 People who joined BREATHER Plus had an equal chance of being randomised to one of the two groups.