Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1997. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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United Press International; Tuesday December 16, 1997 - 4:03 PM EST
Mara Bovsun in New York
The new research suggests the number of people who have early symptoms is far lower than the 90 percent usually thought to show such signs.
Researchers in India found that a set of symptoms _ joint pain, night sweats and fever _ were strong predictors of who had the deadly virus, especially when considered along with risk factors, such as unprotected sex with a prostitute or genital ulcers.
In the study of nearly 4,000 patients in India, researchers from Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and the National AIDS Research Institute of India found that about 47 percent of the patients had one of the symptoms during the acute phase of the disease, which is within the first weeks after infection.
It was so early that immune systems had not yet developed antibodies, the sign of infection picked up by standard blood tests. The researchers instead used a test that homes in on a protein, called p24, from the virus itself.
The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Robert C. Bollinger, an author of the study, says people who had joint pain were six times more likely to have the p24, while those with night sweats were nine times more likely to have p24.
Bollinger, an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, says earlier research has indicated that about nine out of 10 patients have some symptoms of acute HIV infection. In those studies, however, doctors knew which patients had already tested positive for HIV, and that may have biased the results.
He says the study may be used to identify carriers, and slow the spread of the disease.
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