Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia - Friday October 2, 1998
The tests could potentially save months wasted on drugs that might not work, the researchers said.
Dr. Brigitta Mueller of Harvard Medical School and colleagues at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) said their findings might also apply to adults.
"There are obviously major differences between children and adults," she said, saying that more tests were needed on larger groups of patients. It is well known that a cocktail of strong drugs can control the HIV virus that causes AIDS. But not all drugs work the same way in people, and doctors must fine-tune the mixture and dosage.
There are more than a dozen drugs to choose from and most cause severe side effects from nausea to changes in body fat distribution. The virus can also become resistant to drugs, so it is important to get the cocktail right straight away.
Usually doctors use just two tests in deciding that -- a count of the CD4 T-cells, the immune system cells that HIV attacks, and a measure of viral load or how much virus a patient has in the blood.
Mueller found that adding two tests could predict a patient's response much more quickly and accurately -- how much drug was in the blood after the first week of therapy and the rate at which the virus was eliminated from the blood.
When the four tests were done, the researchers reported in the journal AIDS, they could predict the response to drug therapy of 39 out of 41 children.
"These findings indicate that it might be possible to use these data from the first week of treatment to predict a child's chances of being a long-term responder to the drug," Dr. Steven Zeichner of the NCI said in a statement. The NCI team used Abbott Laboratories' drug ritonavir, but said they believed their findings would also apply to other drugs.
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