This article talks about getting rid of AIDS - and without drugs.
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2558329758-763
Title: Full Story
04:47 PM ET 02/04/99
Can Stopping AIDS Treatment Work?
Can Stopping AIDS Treatment Work?
By DANIEL Q. HANEY=
AP Medical Editor=
CHICAGO (AP) _ The tentative results of a small human experiment
offer a glimmer of possibility that the body's own defense system
can be trained to hold down the AIDS virus.
The clearly risky approach attempts to mimic the success of the
much-talked-about ``Berlin patient,'' a newly infected German man
who stopped and started AIDS therapy and eventually quit it
entirely, only to discover that his virus had inexplicably
disappeared. He has remained free of HIV for two years.
``I don't see why others cannot become the Berlin patient,''
said Dr. Franco Lori, head of the Research Institute for Genetic
and Human Therapy at Georgetown University in Washington.
Lori's team is one of a few exploring the idea that it may be
possible to wean people away from the demanding regimen of AIDS
medicines without actually curing them of their infections.
Lori presented his findings Thursday at the 6th Conference on
Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
Some physicians are skeptical. They fear AIDS patients who learn
of these attempts will stop taking the drugs on their own _ with
potentially deadly consequences.
``My concern is that this will be overplayed,'' said Dr. Robert
Schooley of the University of Colorado, a conference organizer.
``It sounds good to patients. Who wouldn't want to stop treatment?
But the real question is whether you can change the immune
response. I worry patients will stop therapy. Whenever that
happens, in my experience, the virus comes roaring back.''
Lori calls the approach stop and go. The idea: Treat people with
standard AIDS drugs until all signs of HIV vanish from the
bloodstream. Withhold the medicines until the virus returns. Then
give the drugs again. Keep repeating the cycle until eventually the
virus never comes back.
It probably won't be eradicated entirely, so the theory goes,
but the body's immune defenses will be able to keep it from the
explosive growth that is HIV's killing trademark.
Lori has tried the approach so far on three patients. While it's
still too soon to know whether it will work, Lori finds the first
few weeks' results promising. The interval before the virus returns
is lengthening.
Furthermore, he said that in more aggressive experiments on
monkeys, the only practical nonhuman substitute for AIDS, the
approach seems to keep the virus at bay for good.
The next step is a much larger study involving 40 to 80
patients, he said.
Dr. Bruce Walker is conducting similar early-stage experiments
on patients at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. ``We
really don't have any data yet to suggest that this (stopping and
starting therapy) is something we should be doing,'' he said.
``I would not put one of my patients on this,'' said Dr. Roger
Pomerantz of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. ``People
have talked about this, but it's the first time I've seen anyone
have the guts to try it.''
In Lori's study, three patients took a combination of the drugs
DDI, hydroxyurea and indinavir. The first time they stopped
treatment, the virus returned in one week. Doctors treated them
again and stopped. This time the virus stayed away for 2{ weeks.
Again doctors started and stopped the drugs. The virus disappeared
for six to eight weeks.
No one knows how long this will go on or whether eventually
these cycles will put the virus into permanent retreat.
