November 8, 2006

Grape Expectations: Side Effects Researchers Go Wine Tasting

Wine lovers everywhere are toasting new findings that a natural substance found in red grape skins cuts heart disease and diabetes in mice. And among the first to raise their glasses are the hundreds of thousands taking HIV-fighting meds that clog their arteries and raise their blood sugar.

A Harvard Medical School study suggests that the side effects-weary might one day be able to drown their troubles in an oral concentration of the grapy stuff, known as resveratrol. (Sorry: You would have to drink about 1,000 bottles of red wine a day to get the same benefits as those mice.) “There’s a future in all of this,” says HIV specialist Donald Kotler, MD.

Years of research loom ahead before such a product would reach pharmacies worldwide, first to investigate the leap from mice to humans and then its effects on people with HIV. “It’s not ready for prime time,” says Kotler. Joseph Baur, a lead researcher on the study, told POZ.com that he is not in a position to comment on resveratrol’s benefits for people with HIV because it’s so early in the game.

Michelle Dipp, MD, of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sirtris Pharmaceuticals says, however, that her company is developing a pill form of resveratrol that may hit bathroom cabinets as early as 2011. (Resveratrol supplements are currently available, but only providing the equivalent of about five glasses of wine each.) She says, “When these [pills] are out on the market, we don’t see a reason why a patient who is HIV positive couldn’t take them.”

People with HIV have good reason to at least keep an eye on the research. In one large international study, artery-clogging cholesterol levels were above normal in 27% of positive patients taking protease inhibitors. And the ongoing Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study has found that positive men on treatment are more than three times as likely to suffer from diabetes as HIV negative subjects.

For now, wine-drinking habits are not expected to change much among positive people—nor are experts recommending that they do.

HIV positive New Yorker Gregory Huang-Cruz isn’t stocking up on Bordeaux yet, but he’s hopeful. Huang-Cruz is living with both Type-2 diabetes and HIV, so resveratrol may be just what the 43-year-old is looking for to simplify his daily regimen. In 2003, his blood sugar shot up when he began taking protease inhibitors, requiring him to go on insulin. “I would prefer to come off insulin and just be on pills,” says Huang-Cruz.

Likewise, Jack Miller, a 33-year-old from New Jersey who has had HIV since 1994 and suffers from high cholesterol, might benefit from this wine in a pill. “It would give me a better, healthier outlook,” he says. Meanwhile, his glass is half full.