Zidovudine may also be used to treat some conditions associated with human herpesvirus 8 HHV-8 infection in people with HIV. If giving zidovudine oral solution to a newborn baby, make sure to use the correct-sized syringe to measure the dose accurately. Zidovudine injection is given by IV infusion. Use zidovudine injection exactly as your health care provider has instructed.
If you do not understand how to use zidovudine injection, ask your health care provider. If you use too much zidovudine, contact your health care provider or local poison control center right away, or go to the nearest hospital emergency room. For more information on how to use zidovudine, see the FDA drug labels for zidovudine tablets and zidovudine capsules, oral solution, and solution for IV injection. If you miss a dose of zidovudine, take or inject the missed dose as soon as you remember it.
But if it is almost time for your next dose, skip the missed dose and just take or inject your next dose at the regular time. Do not take or inject two doses at the same time to make up for a missed dose. Zidovudine may cause side effects.
Some side effects of zidovudine can be serious as noted above. Many side effects from HIV medicines, such as nausea or occasional dizziness, are manageable.
Tell your health care provider if you have any side effect that bothers you or that does not go away. These are not all the possible side effects of zidovudine.
To learn more about possible side effects of zidovudine, read the drug label or package insert or talk to your health care provider or pharmacist. Get the latest public health information from CDC. Home Drug Database Zidovudine. Drug Database: Zidovudine. Drug Database Search Drug Database search. Anthelmintic Benzimidazole. Antibacterial Glycopeptide. Antibacterial Lincosamide.
Antibacterial Macrolide. Antibacterial Quinolone. Antibacterial Sulfonamide. Antifungal Azole. Antifungal Imidazole.
Antifungal Nucleoside Analog. Antifungal Polyene. Antimalarial Aminoquinoline. Antimalarial Dihydrofolate Reductase Inhibitor. Antimycobacterial Cyclic Peptide. Antimycobacterial Rifamycins. Antiviral Interferon Alpha.
Antiviral Nucleoside Analog. Attachment Inhibitor. Broadly Neutralizing Antibodies. Capsid Inhibitors. CCR5 Antagonist. CD4 Attachment Inhibitor. Combination Drugs. Fusion Inhibitor. Gene Therapy Products. Immune Globulins. Immune Modulators. Integrase Inhibitors. People joked that the real Aids money lay in making these bleepers; in New York in the late Eighties, opera performances were punctuated by bleeps.
Cottrell stopped taking AZT after a few weeks, but then he got scared, and began taking it once more. I felt that I was carrying my life around in that bag. At a specialist clinic he was given a sheet of paper which explained that AZT was the most efficient treatment, but also that it hadn't been around long enough for anyone to know the long-term effects. Like most people in his position, he said he'd try anything, and he was prescribed mg a day.
I had been on AZT for three years, and my T4 count was levelling between and an average T4 count in healthy adults is between and 1, And then last year I started to get sick. I had repeated chest infections, and in November I had a stroke.
I was hospitalised in a specialist ward. I asked them for my T4 count, and when they came back, they were were uncomfortable about it. My T4 count was I thought I was finished. I threw away all the pills I was taking - I was taking seven every morning and evening. I started to change my diet, and then I went back to my doctor. When I had my new T4 count it was I've had three migraines since January, a little bit of asthma coming back, but basically I feel much better.
If I'd continued to believe in the traditional medicine sytem I would have been dead either this year or next year. Two weeks ago Hardy met a volunteer with the Terrence Higgins Trust, who told him that he and his boyfriend were taking AZT and it was working like a dream. He said four months. I said that that was the trap that everyone was falling into. The AZT will work for you for a little while, for the maximum of one year, as it did for me, and afterwards the damage became visible.
It is hard to think of another product that is so dominant in its field. You read the showbiz autobiographies and those three little letters snap out of the page. He agreed. That may be why some people, including a few reporters, concluded that I was sicker than I actually was. Somebody advised him to drink all his blood and replace it with new blood.
Rudi lost his temper and said: 'I want this medicine. But I had to give in and prescribe it - he was so insistent. But he didn't take it regularly.
He went off every time with tons of drugs, and every time I went to see him I found unused packets all over the place. It stops the virus replicating. At the beginning they gave people much too massive doses, which affected us physically. I had no recognisable toxic side-effects from it. I began taking it in September , I think, and I came off it last August.
We've never discussed it since. The whole thing is so complicated, because I took a lot of other drugs as well. And then obviously if I got an infection there was fluconazole and all of that area. And then at a certain point they added hydrocortisone and fludrocortisone to keep my energy up. Jarman has recently been in hospital.
I've had a skin complaint and they decided it would be very sensible to take me off all my pills, and then go back on the drugs to see if they were causing the skin complaint. They can obviously play around with the drugs. You can say that if it helps someone psychologically then it must be doing some good. I think the doctors generally feel that it does some good. But how do you know?
Retrovir, the drug's brand name, accounts for more than 13 per cent of its total income, and yielded pounds m last year. As the only big earner to have been launched by the company in the past decade, the continued success of AZT is crucial to its growth. The company will be well aware that at the end of last year the World Health Organisation estimated that about 13 million men, women and children have been infected with HIV since the start of the pandemic.
Part of the Wellcome Foundation was floated on the stock market in , the year of the AZT breakthrough. Subsequent rises in share prices have been directly linked to the fortunes of the drug and the results of new trials. In February , the share price jumped By November the share price had almost doubled to p; year-on-year pre-tax profits were up 28 per cent to pounds m. In early , the share price was at p; last year's pre-tax profits were pounds m.
It was just this emotive demand that led to the picketing of the Wellcome shareholders' meeting in January Activists complained about the price of AZT, and what they saw as Wellcome's reluctance to provide all available information on the drug. Wellcome shareholders were irritated by this intrusion, not least when Act Up members interrupted the meeting and insisted on talking to Sir Alfred Shepperd, the outgoing chairman.
But Wellcome executives were baffled: they believed they had done everything they could to benefit people with HIV and Aids, certainly more than any other pharmaceuticals company. Was it not these very same activists who had celebrated when AZT was launched three years earlier? At first Wellcome defended its pricing on. The recommended dosage was also reduced for medical reasons, which meant many more people could tolerate its toxicity.
Today AZT costs about dollars 3, per person per year, or about pounds 2, As would be expected, Wellcome plays up the good news. When, in , two double- blind placebo trials of the effects of AZT on asymptomatic and less seriously ill patients showed that it could delay the progression of the disease, much was made of the results and the share price rose by 30p.
But when, four months later, the company admitted that AZT had caused cancer in rodents, it explained that the rats and mice were given 10 times the dose prescribed to humans, and that several other drugs in use by humans had also produced tumours in animals when administered over long periods. Wellcome's share price went down one penny.
Wellcome's PR machine is an impressive force, and much money is spent on convincing the media of AZT's worth. You go and see them and you get a lot of bumph: how AZT works, why it is more effective than other anti- retrovirals.
Wellcome house-magazines talk of the extra , productive years of life it has made possible through the drug, about how many thorough and independent studies have stressed AZT's efficacy.
The day-to-day therapy of the patient is not our responsibility. But about three years ago we started to open our labs to people with HIV and their carers, contrary to the advice of my security and other colleagues. You then realise the uncertainty and the frustrations involved in that act of taking a tablet for the very first time. When people with HIV came through the door of the lab I could almost touch their anger.
But I realised that the anger was not really about Wellcome or me, but about their mortality. They were frustrated, and saying, 'Please, please what can I do? Dr Jones is one of the few pharmaceutical industry representatives on Britain's Medical Controls Agency. Wellcome has clearly selected its spokesman with care.
Otherwise we look like ogres and robber barons all the time. That's the whole history of our business; if you've got a problem with a product, you must, you must, you must tell people. The criticism hurts a lot; our integrity as a scientific body is important to us. I don't take too kindly to people saying, 'Oh, you don't want to listen to Wellcome, because they would say that, wouldn't they? You have to believe that the integrity of science is good. Jones has had a bad few weeks.
Wellcome's share price was hammered by last month's Concorde trial report, falling 10 per cent to p, before rallying to p. Five days after the report appeared, Wellcome staged a damage limitation exercise, at which Jones told a press conference that he was unhappy with the way the results were released, without peer review or advice to patients, and saying it had caused panic among those with HIV.
He said that the full results had yet to be released, and hoped that a more beneficial picture of early intervention with AZT would emerge at the ninth International Aids Conference in Berlin in June. He also outlined that the protocol of the study had changed from that agreed in When an American study reported in that AZT did have beneficial effects on people with asymptomatic HIV, the Concorde officials decided that people on its trial could switch to AZT if they wanted to; this may have led to a diluting of the results.
Last week, Jones reiterated why AZT may still be beneficial, and why doctors should continue to prescribe the drug early. Five of these are control studies with placebos, and five are cohort studies, in which we simply give the drug and observe what happens. These studies involved more than 6, patients and ranged from one to four years in duration. We believe we have accrued sufficient data to show that taking the drug when you're asymptomatic does delay the onset of further symptoms.
For the launch conference in London, journalists flew in from all over Europe to hear Wellcome executives describe how pounds 1m was being distributed to many educational organisations. An emotional climax of sorts was provided by Jerry Breitman, the company's US director of professional relations. He was there to present the 'workplace initiative', and his speech contained a little surprise at the end.
Like the wig salesman whose coup de grace is to rip off his own toupee, Breitman declared himself HIV-positive. It is, truly, one of the best decisions I have made in a very long time. One of the initiatives raised was Wellcome's involvement with the Terrence Higgins Trust.
This first surfaced in , with the publication of four information leaflets. Two months ago staff at the Trust and volunteers read in their newsletter that the link had been strengthened. The newsletter explained that 'THT, along with the Wellcome Foundation, is about to begin producing an important new medical information series.
THT are providing a series of medical updates for all staff and volunteers. We will be providing them on a regular basis every two months in the evening. Regular visits to your doctor for checkups and blood tests are a vital part of staying healthy.
If necessary, your doctor can prescribe lipid-lowering therapy. Researchers are studying the lipodystrophy syndrome to try to discover ways of helping people with HIV avoid or reduce this problem. The drugs AZT and d4T are nukes that belong to a group of drugs called thymidine analogues.
Thymidine analogues, particularly d4T and to a lesser extent AZT, have been associated with loss of the fatty layer just under the skin—lipoatrophy. Always consult your doctor and pharmacist about taking any other prescription or non-prescription medication, including herbs, supplements and street drugs.
Some drugs can interact with AZT, increasing or decreasing its levels in your body. Increased drug levels can cause you to experience side effects or make pre-existing side effects worse. On the other hand, if drug levels become too low, HIV can develop resistance and your future treatment options may be reduced. It may also be necessary to avoid drugs that do not affect AZT drug levels, but cause similar side effects. If you must take a drug that has the potential to interact with your existing medications, your doctor can do the following:.
The following drugs interact or have the potential to interact with AZT. These lists are not exhaustive. AZT should never be combined with d4T Zerit, stavudine , as these drugs interfere with each other. For some people, but not all, methadone increases the blood level of AZT.
Aspirin, codeine, morphine and a number of other drugs can also affect the metabolism of AZT, so use of these drugs should be discussed with your doctor.
The antibiotic clarithromycin can reduce the absorption of AZT. This can be avoided by taking the two medications at least two hours apart. Over time, as new copies of HIV are made in the body, the virus changes its structure. These changes are called mutations and can cause HIV to resist the effects of anti-HIV drugs, which means those drugs will no longer work for you.
To reduce the risk of developing drug resistance, all anti-HIV drugs should be taken every day exactly as prescribed and directed. If doses are delayed, missed, or not taken as prescribed, levels of AZT in the blood may fall too low. If this happens, resistant virus can develop. If you find you are having problems taking your medications as directed, speak to your doctor and nurse about this. They can find ways to help you. When HIV becomes resistant to one drug in a class, it sometimes becomes resistant to other drugs in that class.
This is called cross-resistance. Feel free to talk with your doctor about your current and future treatment options. To help you decide what these future therapies might be, at some point your doctor can have a small sample of your blood analysed using resistance testing. Should HIV in your body become resistant to AZT, your doctor, with the help of resistance testing, can help put together a new treatment regimen for you.
The fixed-dose combinations Combivir and Trizivir are single tablets which combine AZT with other anti-HIV drugs, reducing the number of pills that need to be taken. Trizivir contains the same combination as Combivir, plus mg abacavir Ziagen. The usual standard adult dose of AZT is mg per day, taken as mg twice a day, with or without food. Formulations can change, and dosages may need to be customized.
All medications should always be taken as prescribed and directed. Your doctor can tell you more about the availability and coverage of Retrovir in your region. Department of Health and Human Services. Health Canada. Drug Products Database : www. Public Health Service Task Force. Abstract TuFo Assessment of adipokine expression and mitochondrial toxicity in HIV patients with lipoatrophy on stavudine- and zidovudine-containing regimens.
Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes ;40 5 Severe anemia secondary to a probable drug interaction between zidovudine and valproic acid. Clinical Infectious Diseases ;38 5 :ee Effects of zidovudine, stavudine, and beta-aminoisobutyric acid on lipid homeostasis in mice: possible role in human fat wasting.
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