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Biotech / Medical : Agouron Pharmaceuticals (AGPH) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JOHN W. who wrote (3817)	2/12/1998 6:42:00 AM
From: Henry Niman	Respond to of 6136

'Protease Paunch' Seen in Some AIDS Patients (2/5) BY ED SUSMAN c.1998 Medical Tribune News Service CHICAGO -- Powerful drugs called protease inhibitors have been credited as the primary reason deaths from AIDS are dropping dramatically in the industrialized world, but success doesn't always come without some problems. Researchers across North America are reporting the baffling development of humps of fat in people infected with the AIDS virus, HIV, who are taking these potent anti-retroviral drugs. The lumps appear as a ''protease paunch,'' ''horsecollar'' buildups around the shoulders and ''buffalo humps'' on the back. At the 5th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections here this week, several researchers presented papers on their patients' strange afflictions. But experts stressed that while the pockets of fatty tissue may give patients a cosmetic problem, there is absolutely no indication that the lumps and humps are an omen that treatment is failing. ''A good guess would be that about 5 percent of patients taking protease inhibitors develop these fatty deposits,'' said Dr. Richard Hengel, a senior fellow at Emory University in Atlanta. ''We really don't know why they occur in our patients. We don't know why they occur in patients who don't have AIDS and aren't taking protease inhibitors.'' Howard Rosenberg, a fellow in infectious diseases at Cornell University Medical College in New York, said, ''Patients knew about this problem before many doctors. They talk about it on the Internet. It's called 'protease paunch' or 'Crix belly.''' Many of the patients are taking indinavir, or Crixivan, a Merck & Co. protease inhibitor, although the phenomenon has been seen in patients taking any kind of protease inhibitor. Dr. Joan Lo, an endocrine disorders fellow at the University of San Francisco, said several of her patients with the fatty growths have never been on protease inhibitors, but have developed the condition while taking older drugs known as nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (AZT is one of them). Lo said she's concerned that patients might want to stop life-saving treatments because the deposits are disfiguring. Dr. Jonathan Angel, of Ottawa General Hospital in Canada, already has had a patient stop taking his medication because he developed an unsightly hump. But 10 weeks after stopping therapy, the hump hasn't regressed, Angel said. Toni Piazza-Hepp, a specialist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Bethesda, Md., reported on 21 cases of the humps related to protease treatment. She said the deposits are noticed by patients as soon as two months after taking the drugs. ''This phenomenon has to be investigated further,'' Rosenberg said. ----- (The Medical Tribune Web site is at medtrib.com )