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"Drugs to protect the brain from HIV
virus"
The
Star (www.thestar.com.my)
(04/10/06)
WASHINGTON: It is an Achilles' heel of HIV therapy: The AIDS virus can sneak
into the brain to cause dementia, despite today's best medicines.
Now scientists are beginning to test drugs that may protect against the
memory loss and other symptoms of so-called neuroAIDS, which afflicts at
least one in five people with HIV and is becoming more common as patients
live longer.
With almost one million Americans, and almost 40 million people worldwide,
living with HIV, that is a large and under-recognised toll.
“That means HIV is the commonest cause of cognitive dysfunction in young
people worldwide,” says Dr Justin McArthur, vice-chairman of neurology at
Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, who treats neuroAIDS. “There's no
question it's a major public health issue.”
While today's most powerful anti-HIV drugs do help by suppressing levels of
the virus in blood — so that there is less to continually bathe the brain —
they cannot cure neuroAIDS. Why? HIV seeps into the brain soon after someone
is infected, and few anti-HIV drugs can penetrate the brain to chase it
down.
“Despite the best efforts of (anti-HIV) therapy, brain is failing,” says Dr
Harris Gelbard, a neurologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
He is part of a major new effort funded by the National Institutes of Health
to find the first brain-protecting treatments.
What is now called neuroAIDS is much different from the AIDS dementia of the
epidemic's early years, when patients often had horrific brain symptoms
similar to end-stage Alzheimer's, unable to move or talk. They would die
within six months. — AP
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