FRIDAY, Oct. 19, 2018 (HealthDay News) — From 2014 to 2016 there was an increase in the annual number of HIV preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) users in the United States, although only about 7 percent of those with indications for PrEP were prescribed PrEP in 2016, according to research published in the Oct. 18 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Ya-lin A. Huang, Ph.D., from the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues analyzed 2014 to 2016 data from the IQVIA Real World Data-Longitudinal Prescriptions (IQVIA database) to estimate the number of PrEP users in the United States.
The researchers found that there was a 470 percent increase in the annual number of PrEP users aged ≥16 years from 2014 to 2016, from 13,748 to 78,360. Among 32,853 PrEP users for whom race/ethnicity data were available in 2016, 11.2, 13.1 and 4.5 percent were black, Hispanic, and Asian, respectively. Of the estimated 1.1 million persons who had indications for PrEP, approximately 7 percent were prescribed PrEP in 2016, including 2.1 percent of women with indications for PrEP.
“Barriers to the provision of PrEP for persons in populations with the highest rates of annual HIV diagnoses, such as black and Hispanic men and women, need to be better understood to help guide the development of interventions to increase access to and utilization of PrEP,” the authors write.
One author is employed by ProSphere Tek.
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