Can the progress of HIV be “weighed”?

[5 June 2009 - 14h26]

Is it possible that something as simple as a set of scales could help to assess the progress of disease in people infected by HIV who are being treated with antiretrovirals? That is what a team at the Pasteur Institute is suggesting as a way of compensating for the lack of availability of laboratory testing in the world’s poorest countries. The idea is a simple yet effective one.

It is certainly true that monitoring patients receiving antiretroviral treatment (fortunately now in increasingly large numbers in these countries) is extremely costly. Which means that such monitoring is often inaccessible in poorer countries. And yet it’s vital because of the very complexity of these treatments.

Hence the need to find other monitoring tools. Weight gain and weight loss is one such tool, the author explains. In collaboration with Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières), he conducted an experiment involving 2,500 Cambodians and 2,600 Kenyans, all infected with HIV. They were monitored over two and half years, the aim being to assess the prognostic value of weight gain.

The first results seem to be convincing. There appears to be a strong correlation between progression in the weight curve and survival. Three months after starting treatment, those whose weight gain 5% or lower had a 6 times higher mortality rate at 3 months than those who gained 10% of their body mass. The author goes on to stress the universal nature of the prognostic value of this approach, regardless of the patient’s sex or the clinical stage of the disease.

Source : Institut Pasteur, Médecins sans Frontières,

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