Preference for daily oral pills over long-acting antiretroviral therapy options among people with HIV

To examine the characteristics of people with HIV (PWH) who prefer remaining on daily oral antiretroviral therapy (ART), rather than switching to long-acting ART (LA-ART).

Building upon a discrete choice experiment (DCE), we examined characteristics of individuals who always selected their current daily oral tablet regimen over either of two hypothetical LA-ART options presented in a series of 17 choice tasks.

We used LASSO to select sociodemographic, HIV-related, and other health-related predictors of preferring current therapy over LA-ART, and logistic regression to measure the associations with those characteristics.

Among 700 PWH in Washington State and Atlanta, Georgia, 11% of participants ( n  = 74) chose their current daily treatment over LA-ART in all DCE choice tasks. We found that people with lower educational attainment, good adherence, more aversion to injections, and who participated from Atlanta to be more likely to prefer their current daily regimen over LA-ART.

Gaps in ART uptake and adherence remain, and emerging LA-ART treatments show promise to address these challenges and help a larger portion of PWH to achieve viral suppression, but preferences for these new treatments are understudied. Our results show that certain drawbacks of LA-ART may help to maintain demand for daily oral tablets, especially for PWH with certain characteristics. Some of these characteristics (lower educational attainment and Atlanta participation) were also associated with a lack of viral suppression. Future research should focus on overcoming barriers that impact preferences for LA-ART among those patients who could benefit most from this innovation.