AIDS patient dies after unproven heated-blood treatment

NEW YORK — A desperate AIDS patient died hours after flying to Mexico to receive an unproven treatment in which his blood was removed, heated and put back, the patient’s doctor said Wednesday.

The treatment was widely publicized in June. Dr. Kenneth Alonso in Atlanta claimed the treatment, called hyperthermia, eliminated signs of the AIDS virus in a man with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a deadly skin cancer common in AIDS patients.

Details of Alonso’s findings have not yet been published in a scientific journal, but patients are clamoring for more information, said Dr. Gabriel Torres, medical information consultant for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a patient advocacy group in New York.

“The majority of physicians who take care of AIDS patients have been overwhelmed by questions from the patients about hyperthermia,” Torres said Wednesday. “And we don’t have any information.” Torres directs the AIDS ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York.

In a survey of 300 AIDS doctors, 90 percent said they had been asked by patients about hyperthermia, Torres said.

Alonso said a report of his findings will appear shortly in the journal Molecular Oncology and Tumor Pharmacotherapy.

The patient who died is one of only three who have undergone the treatment, in which the blood is removed, heated and returned in a continuous process.

A team led by Dr. Lawrence Deyton of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases went to Atlanta on July 25 at Alonso’s invitation to review his findings. Torres demanded that the institute release its report of that visit.

“The report will be completed by the middle of next week, and a statement will be released right after that,” said Mary Jane Walker, a spokeswoman for the institute.

Hyperthermia is used to treat some forms of cancer. Some doctors say it might turn out to be useful in the treatment of AIDS or AIDS-related cancers such as Kaposi’s sarcoma, but they say the treatment cannot yet be evaluated.

The report by the team from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases could help end the confusion, Torres said.

If the findings look promising, “then the next step would be to try to reproduce the results elsewhere,” he said. If the findings aren’t encouraging, “we should not invest taxpayers’ dollars in the research,” he said.

Three AIDS patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma have received the hyperthermia treatment so far.

The first, treated in February, shows no signs of Kaposi’s sarcoma or of the AIDS virus six months later, Alonso said.

The second, treated in mid-June, has had a 50 percent regression of Kaposi’s sarcoma tumors in his lungs and reduced levels of the AIDS virus, Alonso said. They were treated in Atlanta.

The third was the patient who died in Mexico. He was treated on Aug. 1 under Alonso’s supervision.

“The patient died the next day, hours later,” said Alonso. “Apparently he had a cardiac rhythm disturbance and developed pulmonary edema. And it was not possible to resuscitate him.” Pulmonary edema is the build-up of fluid in the lungs.

Alonso said the patient didn’t die because of the treatment but because his disease was much more severe than doctors thought.

Alonso said the procedure was done in Mexico rather than Atlanta because his hospital, Atlanta Hospital, was having difficulties with Georgia regulatory officials and because a group of Mexican doctors had invited him to train them in the procedure.

Dr. Bernard Bihari of New York, the patient’s doctor, was critical of Alonso’s handling of the case. Bihari treats AIDS patients and is executive director of the Community Research Initiative, an organization that conducts trials of experimental AIDS treatments.

Bihari said he advised chemotherapy, but that the patient sought hyperthermia against his advice after learning about it through news reports. He said chemotherapy could probably have kept the patient alive for two years.

“I think he died because of media hype,” Bihari said. “He’d be alive and stable now with conservative treatment.”

But Alonso said he had advised the patient against hyperthermia, but that Bihari had asked that the patient receive it. “Basically, this patient was done at Dr. Bihari’s insistence,” Alonso said.