A HIV positive patient of European ancestry has been referred to you for treatme

Question

A HIV positive patient of European ancestry has been referred to you for treatment. A standard treatment is a cocktail of retroviral drugs including abacavir. Before prescribing this, you review the patient’s records and see that one of her uncles had a lethal reaction to abacavir treatment.

a. What test or tests would you do on the patient before starting her on abacavir?

b. What results of your test would cause you to not make this prescription?

c. Explain to the patient, who is not a scientist, what tests you want to do and why you want to do these tests.

Explanation / Answer

a- HLA-B*5701 testing would be done before starting her on abacavir.

b- To test for the HLA-B5701 allele, blood or saliva specimen is collected.The genetic sequences coding for the HLA-B5701 are probed and reported as positive if the allele is present. It means that the patient is at risk of developing a hypersentivity reaction to abacavir.

c- Drug hypersensitivity test i want to do to know whether you can start abacavir drug treatment or not.

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