Study: HIV Patients Do Well After Kidney and Liver Transplants

Until recently, HIV-positive patients have been considered poor candidates for organ transplantation. Scientists were concerned about the need to give immunosuppresive medications, used to prevent organ rejection, to patients with impaired immune systems due to HIV infection.

"Frankly, a lot of us thought that giving cyclosporine to these patients would be almost immediately fatal," said Dr. Lynda Frassetto, associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Some complications have been encountered, she reported, including rejection episodes, delayed graft function, non-AIDS associated infections that responded to antibiotics, and one death from recurrence of hepatitis C infection in a liver transplant patient.

But Frassetto said eight of her first nine transplant patients have survived, one for as long as 18 months. And the HIV virus has remained undetectable in the patients on the highly active antiviral medications, and measures of immune system function remain positive in most.

Frassetto said the procedure is still too new to be routinely advocated.

"Any transplant into an HIV-infected patient should be done as part of an experimental protocol," she said. "This is still a very complicated procedure and requires the help of a lot of specialists in surgery, transplantation, AIDS treatment as well as nephrology."