Severe weight loss is not inevitable.

• Position: Weight loss in AIDS patients - Special Newsletter Edition: Your Health

Proper nutrition management not only can prevent severe weight loss among HIV-positive patients, but improve quality of life and potentially save millions of dollars annually in treatment costs, according to Cade Fields Newman, a registered dietitian and director of services for The Cutting Edge Consulting Group. She cites a study of HIV-infected patients which showed that weight loss among this group is avoidable because food intake patterns--and not hypermetabolism, as commonly thought--most often are responsible for acute or chronic weight-loss episodes.

"This study clearly demonstrates how important aggressive nutritional intervention is to effect treatment. Malnutrition is one of the most serious--and, ultimately, costly--side effects of HIV infection, but it can be prevented, and along with it, the millions of dollars in costs associated with ineffectively treating malnutrition."

In one case, a young male AIDS patient with chronic diarrhea began working with a dietitian in a hospital's outpatient clinic. The dietitian assessed the individual's nutrition status, evaluated his food-drug interactions, and then designed a specific dietary plan that accounted for his lactose intolerance while increasing his protein and calorie...