Forty years in, despite reams of data, advances in testing and treatment, and the best of intentions, experts continue to grapple over the best solution for reaching and convincing millions of people — especially adolescents and young adults — to take highly effective, daily preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV.
Adolescents and young adults are tough customers. Aside from developmental factors — physical, psychological, and emotional changes that occur during the transition out of puberty — novel data suggest that individual level of risk is often misinterpreted, misunderstood, or at times not even considered, despite the fact that roughly one fifth of new HIV diagnoses in the US are in this population.
Dr Joshua Barocas
"We're in sort of a crisis mode of being able to get people on to preventive medicine," Joshua Barocas, MD, infectious disease specialist and director of the Social Determinants of Health and Disparities Modeling Unit at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told Medscape Medical News.
In a study published on April 25 in AIDS CareBarocas and his team found that among almost 140,000 US adolescents and young adults who were assessed for PrEP initiation between 2015 and 2019, only 1.6% received a prescription in the year following their eligibility claim, despite having a sexual risk factor (86.9%) and/or a drug-related risk factor (21.3%).
