Most Effective Malaria Treatment Involves Use of Multiple First-Line Treatments for Patients, Study Says
The most effective way to treat malaria and decrease the development of drug resistance is to treat the disease with multiple first-line treatments, according to a study scheduled to be published in the Sept. 16 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ANI/Thaindian News reports.
For the study, researchers led by Maciej Boni, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, and colleagues from Princeton and Resources for the Future designed a computer model based on more than 100 years of malaria research to determine the most effective treatment for malaria. The researchers simulated several different methods of treating a malaria outbreak, including strategies that involved prescribing a single first-line drug to all patients and strategies that involved prescribing multiple first-line therapies.
The researchers found fewer malaria cases, a lower rate of treatment failure and a delay in the onset of drug resistance in strategies that used multiple first-line therapies. Boni said that "using multiple first-line therapies is the best way to avoid treatment failures and to delay the development of resistance for as long as possible." The researchers recommended that countries distribute a variety of different malaria treatments to patients, noting that such a strategy could reduce the number of malaria deaths and delay further development of drug resistance.
The researchers noted that the strategy might be ineffective in some African countries where resistance to malaria drugs is common and artemisinin-based combination therapies are the only effective malaria drugs. The use of multiple first-line treatments "does not necessarily solve all our problems," Boni said, adding, "Antimalarial drug development needs to continue with the hope of producing novel and highly effective antimalarials that can be deployed alongside ACTs" (ANI/Thaindian News, 9/6).
The study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and NIH (Princeton release, 9/5).
