October 5, 2010 -- A combination of the drugs artemether and lumefantrine are safe and as effective as oral quinine for the treatment of uncomplicated malaria in pregnancy in Uganda, providing rapid parasitic clearance and a cure rate of greater than 95%, according to a study published early online and appearing in an upcoming edition of The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Quinine is considered to be a safe antimalarial treatment during pregnancy but its many adverse side-effects result in poor compliance. In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended the use of artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) for pregnant women during the second and third trimesters. However, there is little research comparing the effects of different drug regimes in pregnancy, and most studies have been conducted in southeast Asia, where malaria transmission rates are low. Few drug trials have been done in regions of Africa in which malaria is endemic.
In this study, an international team led by Patrice Piola, MD, Epicentre in France and the University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, investigated whether the most widely used ACT, artemether-lumefantrine, can be used as safely and effectively as quinine for the treatment of pregnant women with uncomplicated malaria in east Africa.
A total of 304 women in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy were enrolled from antenatal clinics in Uganda and randomly assigned, 152 to each treatment group. Women were assessed for parasitological failure and gametocyte carriage at weekly intervals after the start of treatment up to day 42. At delivery or day 42 (whichever came later), PCR was used to measure whether each treatment had cured new infections.
At day 42, 99.3% of patients taking artemether-lumefantrine were cured compared with 97.6% taking quinine.......
http://www.docguide.com/news/content.nsf/news/852576140048867C852577B3007E67CB
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