WEDNESDAY, Feb. 6 (HealthDay News) -- New research suggests that an expensive blood test could help a small minority of HIV patients discover whether they should avoid a common AIDS drug that can sometimes cause serious side effects.

The test detects sensitivity to the medication abacavir by checking to see if a patient's genetic makeup is linked to poor reactions to the medicine.

"This is very important news in relation to the great hopes from the work with the Human Genome Project," said Magnus Ingelman-Sundberg, a professor at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, who wrote a commentary about the research. The genome project aims to analyze the genetic blueprint of humans.

At issue is the AIDS drug abacavir, also known by the brand name Ziagen, which is found in compound drugs known as Trizivir and Epzicom. The drug is known as a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor and works by preventing the AIDS virus from going through the motions of multiplying.

About 8 percent of patients suffer from hypersensitivity to the drug, said study author Simon Mallal, a researcher at Murdoch University & Royal Perth Hospital in Australia. His report on the results is published in the Feb. 7 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The problems typically occur within the first six weeks that patients use the drug, he added.

According to the study, the side effects include fever, rash, gastrointestinal symptoms and other problems.

By testing patients for a genetic trait that was found in 5.6 percent of 1,956 female and male patients, the researchers found they could spot potential cases of sensitivity to abacavir.

The test's use could allow doctors to do a better job of personalizing drugs for individual patients, Mallal noted.

The study was funded by GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of the drug, and several researchers reported receiving funding from the company. Mallal is the sole shareholder of a company that is trying to get a patent for a test for the genetic trait.

Rowena Johnston, vice president of research for amfAR, The Foundation For AIDS Research, said it remains to be seen if the test will be cost-effective.

According to Mallal, the test could potentially cost $100 to $150 in the United States. Ingelman-Sundberg, the Swedish researcher, put the cost at about $200.

"On the more favorable side, we certainly need more effective ways to predict who will tolerate which drugs or combinations better or worse," Johnston said. Patients who have side effects on drugs often don't bother to take them, which can make their bodies develop immunity to medications, she said.

"This might be one start towards building a battery of tests that could predict who will do well on which antiretrovirals," she said. "But I think more research could provide tools that are easy to implement and might ultimately help patients achieve high adherence so they can take full advantage of the ability of antiretroviral therapy to prolong life."

More information

Learn more about abacavir from the National Institutes of Health.

THURSDAY, Feb. 7 (HealthDay News) -- In a finding that seems to turn conventional wisdom on its head, researchers report that babies of teenage fathers are more likely to be born with health problems than babies born to men over 40.

"We found that being a teenage father was associated with an increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, including preterm birth, low birth weight and neonatal deaths," said Dr. Shi Wu Wen, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa Department of Epidemiology & Community Medicine.

In the study, Wen's team used data from the National Center for Health Statistics to collect information on 2,614,966 births in the United States between 1995 and 2000. To isolate the effects of the teen fathers' age on the outcome of pregnancy, the researchers compensated for the mother's contribution by choosing women 20 to 29 years old.

Women in this age group are less likely to be affected by fertility problems, which can have an effect on birth outcomes, Wen noted. "We also excluded infants with birth defects," he said. "This may explain why we didn't see adverse effects amongst older fathers."

The researchers found that babies born to teenage fathers had a 15 percent increased risk of premature birth, a 13 percent increased risk for low birth weight, and a 17 percent increased risk for being small for gestational age.

These babies also had a 22 percent increased risk of dying within the first month after birth, and a 41 percent increased risk of dying in the first four weeks to one year after birth, although the absolute risk was small -- less than 0.5 percent, the researchers said.

Babies of fathers 40 and older did not experience the same risks, Wen said.

"The public has paid attention to teenage pregnancy, but mostly to teenage mothers," Wen said. "But here we show that teenage fathers are also at high risk. The public and health agencies should pay attention to teenage fathers."

The findings are reported in the February issue of Human Reproduction.

Wen said it's not clear why infants of teenage fathers are at greater risk for health problems. However, he suspects that social factors such as income and lifestyle play a role.

"Young fathers have less stable employment," Wen said. "In addition, teenagers are at risk for more risky behavior like smoking and alcohol and drug use. These are known to be associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes.

"Teenage fathers may also be emotionally less stable," he added. "We know that stress is a risk factor for adverse pregnancy outcomes as well."

One expert agrees that more attention should be paid to teenage fathers and their contribution to the health of their children.

"Paternal age is an ignored and understudied and underestimated contributor to neonatal outcomes," said Dr. F. Sessions Cole, director of newborn medicine and head of the neonatal intensive care unit at St. Louis Children's Hospital. "It's 50 percent egg and 50 percent sperm that form the baby, and 100 percent of the blame is attributed to mothers," he said.

"The risk-taking behaviors of adolescent males probably are a significant part of the reason why their sperm are associated with more adverse neonatal outcomes," Cole said. "These risk-taking behaviors impact sperm in ways we don't know."

Cole believes teenage fathers, like teenage mothers, should receive prenatal counseling. "That way, a prospective father can get some sense of what he can do to optimize the outcome," he said.

More information

For more on healthy babies, visit the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 6 (HealthDay News) -- The antiretroviral drug nevirapine greatly reduces the risk that HIV-infected mothers will pass the virus to their babies during breast-feeding, according to a study conducted in Africa and India.

Nevirapine is already in widespread use in developing countries to prevent HIV-positive women from infecting their newborns during childbirth, note researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.

In this study, the Hopkins team and colleagues in Ethiopia, India and Uganda gave daily doses of the drug to breast-feeding infants when they were 8 to 42 days old.

By the time they reached 6 weeks of age, the rate of HIV infection among infants who received the drug daily was about half that of infants who received a single dose of nevirapine at birth, which is the current standard of care.

After six months, the infants who'd received the six-week drug treatment were almost a third less likely to suffer HIV infection or death than those given the single dose at birth.

The study included about 2,000 infants and was conducted from 2001 to 2007. It's one of the first randomized controlled trials to show that a drug can prevent HIV transmission in infants being breast-fed by HIV-infected mothers.

The findings were presented Monday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, in Boston.

Breast-feeding is a major cause of HIV infection in the developing world. Each year, about 150,000 infants are infected with HIV through breast-feeding, according to the World Health Organization.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has more about HIV infections in infants and children.

MONDAY, Feb. 4 (HealthDay News) -- A groundbreaking study reports that most very low birth-weight babies born to low-income women failed to get critical follow-up care within their first two years of life.

The study illustrates how these premature infants, who are vulnerable to vision, hearing and speech impairments, are falling through the cracks of the U.S. health-care system, the researchers said.

Only 20 percent of the babies with hearing problems returned for specialized care within their first six months of life, while fewer than one in four underwent recommended vision tests between 1 and 2 years of age.

On average, it costs $250,000 to treat an extremely premature baby in the hospital, said study author Dr. C. Jason Wang, an assistant professor of pediatrics and public health at Boston University's Schools of Medicine and Public Health. "When they go home, the least we could do is make sure they can see and they can hear, to make sure they can be successful."

At issue are babies born at less than 3.3 pounds, typically because they are extremely premature. According to Wang, babies can now survive being born as early as after six months of gestation, although the infants often suffer from a variety of serious health problems.

"If they're earlier, their lungs aren't really developed, so they will have trouble breathing, taking in oxygen, and a lot of them will develop something called chronic lung disease," he said. "And there will be trouble in the brain because they don't get enough oxygen to the brain. If it's severe, that could have some consequences later on in terms of cognitive and other functions."

Wang and his colleagues chose to look at babies from poor families on Medicaid in South Carolina because the state has especially good records. Also, Wang said, poor and black women are prone to having very low-birth-weight babies.

The researchers reviewed the medical records of 2,182 very low-birth-weight children born between 1996 and 1998. Among those with hearing loss, just 20 percent received hearing "rehabilitation" by the time they were 6 months old, as guidelines recommend. And only 23 percent received eye exams between 1 and 2 years of age, the study found.

The findings are published in the February issue of Pediatrics.

"People have suspected for a long time that very low-birth-weight infants weren't getting the care that they need," Wang said. "We show for the first time that there's a significant gap in providing needed services."

There are some caveats to the findings, Wang said: The study only looked at one state, and it's not clear whether parents or the medical system contribute to the problem.

Whatever the case, "we need to improve the coordination of care for kids with complex conditions," he said.

Some families, especially those with several children, can be overwhelmed by many different doctors' appointments in different places, Wang explained. "They need a support system," he said.

The findings seemed valid to Dr. Maureen Hack, a professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, who believes the health-care system's lack of organization is to blame.

"It [the study] does express what is happening in this country with respect to indigent population," she said. "But I don't think it's just a problem with preemies. It's depressing."

Another study in the same issue of Pediatrics found other signs of disparities in health care based on race. Researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center reported that children in five minority groups were less likely than whites to have recently visited a doctor or been given medical prescriptions.

More information

Learn more about premature babies from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.