Single-day double dose of famciclovir shortens genital herpes outbreaks.(News)

WASHINGTON -- A single-day treatment of famciclovir taken by a patient within 6 hours of a genital herpes outbreak can significantly speed the time to healing, Dr. Fred Y. Aoki reported at the annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

Current regimens for episodic genital herpes treatment have become shorter and shorter without a loss of efficacy. That, along with pathogenesis data demonstrating that herpes simplex virus (HSV) titers increase in lesions only over the first 24 hours, provide the rationale for use of a single-day, two-dose regimen of 1,000 mg of famciclovir, said Dr. Aoki, professor of medicine, medical microbiology, pharmacology, and therapeutics at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

In a Novartis-funded study, a total of 229 patients aged 18-82 years with at least 4 outbreaks of genital herpes in the preceding 12 months and laboratory-confirmed HSV-2 infection were instructed to take either 1,000 mg of famciclovir twice in one day or placebo, beginning within 6 hours of prodromal symptom onset or the appearance of lesions.

In the intention-to-treat analysis of 125 famciclovir and 145 placebo subjects, the proportion of patients with aborted lesions--that is, not progressing beyond the papule stage--was 23% with famciclovir vs. 13% with placebo. This difference "was statistically significant and probably clinically important," Dr. Aoki ...