Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1992. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - Saturday, August 15, 1992
In a long-term statistical study using the records of thousands of Bay Area gay men, epidemiologist Nancy Hessol and her colleagues at the department's AIDS office found that men infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, ran a five times greater risk of Hodgkin's disease than gay men who were not infected.
The finding suggests that the disease, a type of cancer affecting the lymphatic system, may need to be included in the official list of illnesses that the federal Centers for Disease Control uses to define AIDS cases, Hessol said.
Results of the study are being released today in the current issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, published by the American College of Physicians.
The CDC now lists only three cancers as AIDS-defining diseases. They are Kaposi's sarcoma, primary lymphomas of the brain and another form of lymph cancer called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. If Hodgkin's disease were added, it would make HIV-infected patients who develop the cancer also eligible for special AIDS funds to pay for treatment.
In the report on the San Francisco study, Hessol noted that doctors treating HIV-infected patients should be aware that Hodgkin's disease is more common among those men than physicians had thought. The possible role of HIV infections in predisposing people to other cancers needs further research, she said.
The statistical analysis that Hessol's team conducted on Hodgkin's disease was based, in part, on records from what is known in medical circles throughout the world as the San Francisco City Clinic Cohort Study.
That study uses blood samples drawn between 1978 and 1980 from 6,704 homosexual and bisexual men. The samples were frozen and stored in a long-term study of hepatitis infections.
Over the years, ongoing data from those volunteers have provided a uniquely complete picture of the rate at which the AIDS virus moves from infection to disease. And even though many participants have since died of AIDS, their blood samples continue to provide researchers with valuable information on many aspects of the disease.
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