A clinical trial on the effects of marijuana in patients with HIV infection has begun under the direction of a group of physician-scientists in San Francisco.
Supported by a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the two-year study is a combined project of UC San Francisco and the Community Consortium, a Bay Area association of 200 health care providers who care for the majority of HIV/AIDS patients in the region.
The trial will examine the influence of marijuana on the immune system and on the amount of virus in the body, as well as on its potential interactions with antiviral drugs such as protease inhibitors.
Named the "Short-Term Effects of Cannabinoids in HIV Patients," the clinical trial began last week. A total of 63 patients are scheduled to be enrolled over the next 18 months. In order to be eligible for the study, patients must already be undergoing treatment with either indinavir or nelfinavir, the two most commonly prescribed protease inhibitors for HIV infection.
"Our main goal is find out what is safe for HIV/AIDS patients. We know many patients use marijuana to relieve nausea and loss of appetite brought on by the disease and its treatments, but we don't know how THC--the active ingredient in marijuana--interacts with HIV drug therapies," said Donald I. Abrams, MD, who is principal investigator of the study.
"For example, protease inhibitors like indinavir and nelfinavir are metabolized by the liver, as is THC. We want to see if THC alters the metabolism of protease inhibitors and therefore changes the concentration of the drug in the blood, either creating a level that is too high, producing toxicities, or is too low, rendering the protease inhibitor ineffective," he said.
Abrams is UCSF professor of medicine at the UCSF AIDS Program at San Francisco General Hospital and director of the Community Consortium.
Patients in the trial will be randomly assigned to one of three groups,
each with 21 partic
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Contact: Corinna Kaarlela
corinna@itsa.ucsf.edu
(415) 476-3804
University of California - San Francisco
21-May-1998