Diabetes Drug Eases HIV Treatment Effects

A diabetes drug could help reduce some of the health-threatening side effects of AIDS medications, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

A diabetes drug could help reduce some of the health-threatening side effects of AIDS medications, U.S. researchers said on Monday. They said Avandia can help reduce the odd redistribution of body fat seen when patients take certain cocktails of AIDS drugs and also reduces some of the diabetes-like changes in metabolism. Writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a team at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston said they found that daily doses of GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia, known generically as rosiglitazone, helped patients better handle naturally occurring insulin. The AIDS cocktails, known as highly active antiretroviral therapy or HAART, can keep patients with the deadly virus alive and healthy. But they have severe side effects including changes in how fat is distributed on the body. Some AIDS patients simply lose body fat, while others see odd build-ups of fat on the shoulders or, more dangerously, around the internal organs. Many HIV patients lose fat in their faces, giving them a gaunt look, while gaining it elsewhere. “The metabolic complications of this condition are becoming more significant as patients spend more time on HAART,” Dr. Colleen Hadigan, who led the study, said in a statement. “For example, we now know that 14 percent of men on this therapy may develop type-2 diabetes, which is four times the usual risk; and concerns are also increasing about the related risk of heart disease.” Her team studied 27 patients who randomly got either Avandia or a placebo for three months. The Avandia patients had a 20 percent improvement in insulin sensitivity, a measure of a patient’s risk of diabetes. “We were able to demonstrate that this class of agents can slow down or reverse fat loss in patients with fat atrophy,” Hadigan added. “However there are still a lot of questions to be answered about safety before these results can be widely applied.” (Source: Reuters Health, May 2004)