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| ABSTRACT |
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97 ng/mL at the time of the reappearance of parasitemia. None of the subjects studied on the northern Pacific Coast had recurrent parasitemia. | INTRODUCTION |
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In 1998, because of concerns about the spread of antimalarial drug resistance in Peru, the Ministry of Health began a series of in vivo therapeutic efficacy trials. Initial studies showed high levels of resistance in P. falciparum to both CQ and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine at several sites in the Amazon Basin and high levels of resistance to CQ, but not to sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, on the northern Pacific Coast.10 (G. Stennies, personal communication) As part of this effort to assess the efficacy of current and potential future first-line antimalarial drugs in Peru, we conducted 28-day in vivo efficacy trials of CQ for the treatment of P. vivax infections at three sites in the Amazon region and one on the northern Pacific Coast.
| MATERIALS AND METHODS |
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Patient enrollment and follow-up.
The methods used followed the recommendations of the Pan American Health Organization for in vivo antimalarial drug efficacy testing of P. falciparum in the Americas and draft recommendations for P. vivax in vivo drug efficacy testing12 (Gusmão R, unpublished data). Patients between 2 and 60 years of age with suspected malaria attending the three health centers were screened for parasitemia by thick blood smears. Those with P. vivax monoinfections between 250 and 50,000 parasites/µL of blood and an elevated axillary temperature (
37.5°C) and/or a history of fever within the previous 48 hours who gave informed consent were enrolled in the study. Subjects were excluded if they had symptoms or signs of severe malaria, had another obvious cause for their fever, or had a history of allergy to CQ.
Chloroquine (Ciba-Geigy, S.A., Basel, Switzerland), 25 mg/ kg (base), was administered over a three-day period (10 mg/ kg on days 0 and 1 and 5 mg/kg on day 2). All drug doses were administered under the supervision of a member of the study staff. Subjects were observed for vomiting for 30 minutes after ingesting the drugs; those who vomited the first dose were re-treated with an identical dose. Subjects who vomited twice were dropped from the study. Patients with axillary temperatures
37.5°C were treated with paracetamol.
Patients were asked to return for follow-up evaluations and temperature measurements on days 1, 2, 3, 7, 14, 21, and 28 (days 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 18, 21, and 28 for the Padre Cocha study). Thick blood smears were prepared at the time of all follow-up visits except day 1. Patients who did not return were traced to their homes. All patients were treated with primaquine, 0.5 mg/kg/day for seven days, at the end of their follow-up to prevent relapses, as recommended by the Peruvian National Malaria Control Program. Patients who failed to respond to CQ were re-treated with quinine plus tetracycline or clindamycin.
Standard World Health Organization definitions of parasitologic response were used.13 The patients therapeutic response was classified according to the guidelines of the Pan American Health Organization for in vivo antimalarial drug efficacy testing.12
Laboratory analyses. Thick blood smears were stained with Giemsa and the parasite density was calculated by counting the number of asexual parasites per 300 white blood cells, based on a mean white blood cell count of 6,000/µL. Each blood smear was independently examined by two microscopists. In the case of a difference in results (positive/negative, a difference in species diagnosis, or > 50% difference in parasite density), the blood smear was re-examined by a third microscopist. The final parasite density was an average of the densities of the two concordant microscopists. A minimum of 200 oil-immersion fields were examined before a blood smear was considered negative.
Blood levels of CQ and its major metabolite, desethylchloroquine (DCQ), were measured by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis according to the method described by Patchen and others.14 Venous blood was collected in EDTA at the time of recurrence of parasitemia and refrigerated at 4°C until testing. Chloroquine and DCQ were extracted by adding 0.05 mL of an internal standard (isopropyl analog of CQ), 0.5 mL of 20% Na3PO4·12H2O, and 0.5 mL methyl-tertbutylether to 0.1 mL whole blood. The solution was vortexed for 30 seconds and centrifuged to separate the organic phase. The organic phase was then transferred to another tube and dried with air. The sample was reconstituted with an HPLC mobile phase and a portion was injected into the HPLC system.
To confirm that treatment failure was due to a recrudescence, rather than a reinfection, in the two patients who had therapeutic blood levels (CQ-DCQ > 90 ng/mL), parasite DNA was extracted from blood on day 0 and the day of failure using the QIAamp kit (Qiagen, Chatsworth, CA). The DNA was amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for the Pv200 gene using gene-specific primers.15 Amplified DNA was subjected to electrophoresis on a 10% Tris-borateEDTA agarose gel, stained with silver, and assessed for genotypic patterns of the Pv200 gene based on single-stranded conformational polymorphism (SSCP) analysis, as described.15
Statistical analysis. Data were double-entered. Statistical analyses were carried out using SPSS (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL). Dichotomous variables were compared with the chi-square or Fishers exact tests. The Shapiro-Wilk test was used to test for normality of continuous variables and the Student t-test or Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare means.
| RESULTS |
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37.5°C). Their geometric mean parasite density was 5,129 parasites/µL.
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Plasmodium vivax parasitemia decreased slowly during the first 35 days after treatment was initiated. A total of 28.5% of the patients still had positive blood smears on day 3, 15.0% on day 4, and 10.0% on day 5. It was not until day 7 that all patients had negative blood smears.
Four subjects from the Amazon region had a recurrence of parasitemia during the 28-day follow-up period, two each in Iquitos and Caballococha (Table 2
). No recurrences of parasitemia were observed in the 59 patients followed for 28 days on the northern Pacific Coast. The recurrences occurred in two patients on day 21 and in the other two on day 28 (Table 3
). These four subjects were 7, 7, 13, and 15 years old; three were females. Their parasite densities on day 0 ranged from 1,013 to 24,268 parasites/µL. None had a history of vomiting or diarrhea during the course of their three-day treatment and none had a history of fever or a documented fever at the time of the recurrence of their parasitemia.
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97 ng/mL, indicating that the parasites were resistant to CQ. Although the third patient had every dose of her CQ treatment supervised by a member of the study staff and could have been infected with a resistant strain, her CQ-DCQ blood levels were only 79 ng/mL.
The two strains from patients H032 and H071 were evaluated by PCR and both day 0 and recurrent parasites were shown to be P. vivax. When tested by PCR-SSCP, these two strains were identical genetically at their Pv200 locus to the parasites found in the same patients on day 0, strongly suggesting that the recurrence of parasitemia was due to a recrudescence of infection or relapse, rather a new infection (Figure 2
).
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| DISCUSSION |
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Studies conducted in Indonesia by Baird and others have helped to define P. vivax resistance to CQ in the context of in vivo drug efficacy trials. The minimal effective concentration of CQ against P. vivax is 90100 ng/mL of whole blood.21 In patients treated with a standard 25 mg/kg dose of CQ, mean whole blood levels of CQ and its major metabolite, DCQ, were 141 ng/mL (95% confidence interval = 115167 ng/mL) at 28 days after initiation of therapy.22 Consequently, the presence of CQ in the blood up to 28 days after therapy should be sufficient to eliminate or suppress CQ-sensitive parasites. Based on these data, Baird and others concluded that P. vivax parasitemia within 28 days after a standard 25 mg/kg course of CQ represents strong evidence of resistance, regardless of whether the parasites originated from a recrudescence, a relapse, or even a new infection.22 It is likely that the parasites studied by Baird and others and those in our study are both of the "tropical" variety, which characteristically give rise to a series of relapses beginning one to two months after the primary attack.23
Because of the extremely serious public health implications that identification of CQ-resistant P. vivax has for the Americas, we believe that the criteria for accepting a P. vivax infection as CQ resistant should be even more rigorous. First, the patient should be treated with the standard 25 mg/kg CQ regimen and all drug doses should administered under supervision. Second, the recurrence of parasitemia should occur within the first 28 days after therapy is initiated. Finally, CQ-DCQ blood levels at the time of the recrudescence should be
90100 ng/mL. As additional evidence, it is helpful if genotyping can confirm that the infecting parasite is P. vivax and that recurrent parasites are genetically identical to those from the day 0 samples at at least one locus.
Based on these criteria, many of the reported cases of CQ-resistant P. vivax from South America would not qualify as resistant. In an early report from Brazil, the recurrences of parasitemia occurred three and seven months after the initial infection and were almost certainly relapses.24 Chloroquine blood levels were not measured in either the later report from Brazil or a study in Colombia.8,9 In fact, the only well-documented case of CQ-resistant P. vivax in South America is in one of three travelers from Guyana reported by Phillips and others.7
Our finding of two patients with CQ-resistant P. vivax malaria in the Peruvian Amazon region represents only the second confirmed report of this infection in South America. Both patients were residents of a relatively circumscribed area, 1020 km to the west of the city of Iquitos. While residents of this area may have more ready access to antimalarial drugs than residents of more isolated regions of the Amazon Basin, there are no obvious reasons why a focus of CQ resistance should appear in this area rather than another. Similar to the studies conducted in Indonesia, in which CQ resistance was seen primarily in children,21 our two patients were only 7 and 13 years old.
Although we treated the patients who had recurrences of parasitemia with quinine plus tetracycline or clindamycin, there is no consensus on the treatment of choice for CQ-resistant P. vivax infections. Both quinine and mefloquine have activity against P. vivax, and amodiaquine and halofantrine have been shown to be more active than CQ against CQ-resistant strains of P. vivax.25 Although primaquine has only limited blood schizonticidal activity in the doses normally used to eliminate hypnozoites or P. falciparum gametocytes, in combination with CQ it is also more efficacious than CQ alone for the treatment of CQ-resistant P. vivax.6 In Peru, as in all other countries in the Americas, patients infected with P. vivax who are treated in Ministry of Heath facilities receive both CQ and primaquine (usually 0.25 mg/ kg/day for 14 days or 0.5 mg/kg/day for 7 days), and this may have played some role in suppressing the appearance and/or extension of CQ-resistant parasites in the region.
The existence of these two confirmed cases of CQ-resistant P. vivax in the Amazon region of Peru is of obvious concern to the Peruvian Ministry of Health. Plans have been made to conduct a larger survey in the same area to try to define better the extent of this problem. Since CQ continues to cure blood-stage P. vivax parasitemia in the great majority of patients, no changes have been made in national malaria treatment policy.
Received January 3, 2003. Accepted for publication May 14, 2003.
Acknowledgments: We thank the staff of the Padre Cocha, Moronacocha, Caballococha, and Bellavista Health Centers and the Hospital de Apoyo Iquitos for their assistance with the enrollment, treatment, and follow-up of patients, and Drs. Carlos Calampa and Ana Maria Palacios, without whose support these studies would not have been possible. Drs. Kevin Baird and Alan Magill provided technical assistance for the study in Padre Cocha. Malaria microscopy was conducted by Carola Salas, Julio Figueroa, Ever Alvarez, Anibal Sanchez, and Dolores Rimarachin. Christian Bautista carried out the data analysis.
Financial support: These studies were supported by the U.S. Naval Medical Research and Development Command, National Naval Medical Center (Bethesda, MD), Work Unit No. 847705 82000 25GB B0016 GEIS Lima. Kevin C. Kain was supported by a Canada Research Chair from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and a career award from the Ontario Ministry of Health.
Authors addresses: Trenton K. Ruebush II, Division of Parasitic Diseases, Mailstop F-22, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4770 Buford Highway, Atlanta, GA 30341, Telephone: 770-488-3604 Fax: 770-488-4203 E-mail: tkr1{at}cdc.gov. Jorge Zegarra, Javier Cairo, Ellen M. Andersen, Coralith Garcia, and Lely Solary, U.S. Naval Medical Research Center Detachment, Unit 3800, APO AA 34031, Lima, Peru. Michael Green, Entomology Branch, Division of Parasitic Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4770 Buford Highway, Atlanta, GA 30341. Dylan Pillai and Kevin C. Kain, Tropical Disease Unit, Toronto General Hospital, 200 Elizabeth Street, EN G-224, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M59 2C4. Wilmer Marquiño, Maria Huilca, and Ernesto Arévalo, Instituto Nacional de Salud, Capac Yupanqui, 1400, Jesus Maria 11, Lima, Peru.
Reprint requests: Trenton K. Ruebush II, U.S. Naval Medical Research Center Detachment, Unit 3800, APO AA 34031, Lima, Peru.
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