AIDS Study of ‘Unparalleled’ Scope Set : Health: Scientists seek symptoms and conditions common to different populations. An earlier effort involved only gay and bisexual men.
The federal government and the American Foundation for AIDS Research announced Monday that they will jointly sponsor a massive, long-term study to see how AIDS infection progresses in various populations.
“The scope of this effort is unparalleled,” Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan said in a statement. “The study will result in the most comprehensive collection of information on HIV-infected persons amassed in the history of the AIDS epidemic.”
The study involving thousands of AIDS-infected individuals will seek to determine, among other things, what symptoms and conditions are most common in different groups and what therapies--including approved and “alternative” treatments--patients are using.
“The study will help to identify areas where new research is needed, and may result in some new approaches to treatment,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the federal agency sponsoring the research.
NIAID’s first large-scale study of this kind was the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, known as MACS, which was begun in 1983 and involved 5,000 gay and bisexual men in several cities, including Los Angeles. The MACS study, which has collected information about the history, risk factors and clinical manifestations of AIDS among gay men, has “generated huge amounts of data and clues to designing effective prevention and education programs,” NIAID said.
The newest study will include other patient groups, such as women, pregnant women and intravenous drug users, and involve 42 community-based clinics in the United States and Canada, NIAID said. These include 18 community programs funded by NIAID and 24 community programs sponsored by the foundation.
Participating programs in California include the Southwest Community-Based AIDS Treatment Group in Los Angeles; the Physicians AIDS Consortium of Los Angeles; the AIDS Community Research Consortium in Redwood City; the San Diego Community Research Group; Project Inform Community Research Alliance in San Francisco; and the San Francisco Community Consortium, also funded by NIAID.
“This study will tell us what is happening in the real world to HIV-infected persons,” said Dr. Dan Hoth, director of AIDS activities for NIAID. “It will give us a snapshot of real-world care, rather than the artificial picture we get from a clinical trial. It will tell us whether therapies shown to be effective in research are, in fact, effective in the real world. It will also tell us about the changing patterns of opportunistic infections.
“It will give us a whole series of snapshots,” he added. “And when you put a whole series of snapshots together, what you get is a moving picture of the epidemic.” One of the goals is to identify changing manifestations of HIV illness over time, and examine those factors that appear to influence the prognosis, the sponsors said.
Another area of special interest will be treatments that are now being used by patients, including approved drugs, experimental drugs used in clinical trials and alternative, “underground” drugs.
Any patient affiliated with these community-based programs can participate and information collected will be both confidential and anonymous, coded so that the patients cannot be identified.
Patients participating in the study will be asked a series of questions every three to six months during a regular clinic visit about their health and the medications they are taking. No special clinic visits, lab visits, lab tests or treatments will be involved.
