AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma patients with visceral manifestations. Response to human chorionic gonadotropin preparations.

Abstract

These clinical observations suggest that patients with aggressive visceral forms of KS, usually indicative of an extremely poor prognosis and poor response to combined chemotherapy, can benefit from this new therapeutic approach. In some patients, these preparations also induce several other beneficial effects, such as weight gain, reduction in HIV-1 RNA load, or increase in the CD4+ T-cell count. Additional controlled clinical trials comparing this new therapeutic option with standard cytotoxic chemotherapy are needed. These trials should be extended to patients with KS not related to HIV-1 infection. Because we showed elsewhere that pure hCG had no effect on KS, identification and subsequent clinical use of the active molecules in hCG preparations is urgently needed.