Halting AIDS Drugs Is Risky, Study Finds

People infected with the AIDS virus who periodically interrupt their drug treatment run a higher risk of falling ill and dying of AIDS and other diseases compared with people who stay on the medicines.

That is the conclusion of the largest and most expensive AIDS treatment study ever conducted. It comes as a surprise and bitter disappointment to thousands of people who flocked to it in hopes of finding a way around lifelong use of the drug combinations.

Although the hazards are small -- about a 5% chance of falling ill and a 1.5% chance of dying, over a little more than a year -- they are large enough that patients probably should never stop their medicines.

The study, called SMART, was unexpectedly ended last month even before it finished enrolling volunteers.

Details of the experiment -- which had 5,472 subjects in 33 countries -- are being presented today at the 13th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver. They were previously presented to the AIDS Research Advisory Committee at the National Institutes of Health.