Subject: Benefits of AZT Called Unrelated To Patient's Race 
Date: Published: 11/20/91 (60 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    Technology & Medicine:
    Benefits of AZT
    Called Unrelated
    To Patient's Race
    ----
    By Marilyn Chase
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    Black and Hispanic patients who have the human
 immunodeficiency virus can benefit from the drug AZT,
 provided they get timely access to medical care, researchers
 concluded.
    A cluster of studies in this week's Journal of the
 American Medical Association addressed the concern that has
 troubled public health officials since the release in
 February of a Veterans' Administration report suggesting that
 minorities didn't benefit from the antiviral drug made by
 Wellcome PLC. 
    The reports warned, however, that minority-group patients
 -- especially blacks -- are more likely than whites to be
 diagnosed late in their HIV infection, after symptoms of the
 fatal acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, had
 already appeared.  The reports further said that
 minority-group members are less likely than whites to have
 received preventive drugs for lethal AIDS-related pneumonia.
 All those factors add up to greater suffering and swifter
 death from AIDS, the researchers said in calling for greater
 care in ensuring equal access to AIDS treatment.
    In one report, Stephen Lagakos, a statistician at Harvard
 University, and his coworkers examined more than 2,000
 patients treated in two studies by the federal AIDS Clinical
 Trials Group.  His report found that AZT slowed the
 development of AIDS in infected whites, blacks, Hispanics and
 drug users alike.  In a second report, Philippa Easterbrook, a
 researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and her colleagues
 looked at more than 1,000 patients in 12 metropolitan
 hospital centers and found no inherent difference in minority
 groups' responses to the drug.
    Both studies concluded that ethnic minorities derive
 benefits from taking AZT similar to those that gay white men
 receive.  In an accompanying editorial, Mark D. Smith of the
 Kaiser Family Foundation in Menlo Park, Calif., warned that
 black and female patients are still underrepresented in
 clinical trials.  He also said that the Lagakos and
 Easterbrook studies weren't designed as cross-race
 comparisons and that such analyses "must always be viewed
 with caution."
    But Dr. Smith concluded that a growing body of evidence
 supports applying the same principles of early AIDS treatment
 to all patients regardless of race or gender.  "This is good
 news, not only for ...patients but also for their
 clinicians," he said.

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