New research says it's best to start therapy early

Patients with the AIDS virus are better off if they start taking powerful medicines early, rather than waiting for symptoms of their disease to appear, new research suggests.

Photo: New research says it's best to start therapy early

A new study calls into question guidelines that say patients should delay taking the toxic drugs to stave off treatment-related complications.

The research focused on "drug cocktail" combinations of three or more drugs. The regimens have become a standard treatment in the last decade, but are associated with such complications as kidney failure and a hand- and foot-numbing condition called peripheral neuropathy.

Federal health officials advise patients to delay this treatment until they develop severe symptoms or the infection causes their natural armament of certain white blood cells to dip below a certain level.

But the researchers found that patients who began taking the drugs early, and took them continuously, developed 28 percent fewer cases of kidney failure and peripheral neuropathy.

"That means one quarter of these cases could be avoided," said Dr. John T. Brooks of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the scientists who worked on the study.

The findings were presented Tuesday at a scientific conference in Denver. Dr. Kenneth Lichtenstein of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center led the research.

"The intuitive thing to think is ... the longer you're on the drug, the greater the toxicity," Lichtenstein said. "The surprise in our study is if you didn't develop toxicity in the first six months to a year, your risk of toxicity went down, rather than up", reports AP.

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