A new study has looked into the short and medium term affects of HIV prevention drug Truvada and found it’s side effects of common headache medicine Aspirin.

Truvada is the brand name for the medication used to treat HIV, but recently it has also been discovered that the drug is effective in preventing HIV negative people from contacting the virus.

Concern has previously been raised about what the long term effects of taking a daily dose of the medication may involve.

Noah Kojima and Jeffrey D. Klausner of the School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, was published in the Open Forum Infectious Diseases journal. The researchers compared five different studies into the drugs side effects.

“We conclude that FTC-TDF (Truvada) for PrEP for HIV infection favorably compares to aspirin in terms of user safety. While long-term studies are needed, providers should feel reassured about the safety of short- and medium-term PrEP for HIV infection with FTC-TDF.” the researchers wrote.

The researchers suggest that more long term studies will be required to access how the drug effects patients over several years in treatment.

Trial into PrEP treatment have been conducted in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland and Gilead the company who created the treatment have applied to have the drug registered for preventative treatment in Australia.

Health Minister Susan Ley has been lobbied to make sure the drug is added to Australia’s pharmaceutical benefits scheme as soon as it is approved for use.

OIP Staff

Image by Jeffrey Beall, pubished under a Creative Commons licence: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported