Complexing AIDS.Many AIDS victims develop anemia, and the blood transfusions they receive often cause more of an improvement than would be expected just from treating the anemia. Researchers from St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Medical Center in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. have an explanation for the observation, and have found that transfusing patients more frequently than would be the case for anemia can prolong their lives. People with AIDS The People With AIDS (PWA) Self-Empowerment Movement was a movement of those diagnosed with AIDS and grew out of San Francisco. The PWA Self-Empowerment Movement believes that those diagnosed as having AIDS should "take charge of their own life, illness, and care, and to minimize have abnormally high levels of circulating immune complexes Immune complexes Clusters or aggregates of antigen and antibody bound together. Mentioned in: Wegener's Granulomatosis -- agglomerations of antibodies and antigens. The complexes are usually removed by red blood cells Red blood cells Cells that carry hemoglobin (the molecule that transports oxygen) and help remove wastes from tissues throughout the body. Mentioned in: Bone Marrow Transplantation red blood cells that bind to them and take them to the liver for processing, says George F. McKinley of St. Luke's. When AIDS patients are transfused with packed red cells packed red cells Transfusion medicine A concentrated unit of RBCs prepared from a unit of whole blood by removing plasma Indications Active bleeding, excess intraoperative blood loss, low 'pre-op' or 'post-op' Hcts, chronic anemias–eg, sickle cell anemia, , the number of complexes, which probably include AIDS viruses, goes down in five days. He and his colleagues tried more frequent transfusions to reduce the complexes in 21 patients; the mean survival after diagnosis was 370 days, compared with 249 days for control patients who received a conventional number of transfusions. Eventually the transfusions stop reducing the number of complexes. "It's not a cure," says McKinley, "but it is a delay." |
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