An experimental treatment that causes AIDS patients to develop a dangerously high fever has shown promise as a way of prolonging (延长) and improving the patients’ life.
Called the BioLogic-HT System, the new treatment lets doctors extract (抽出) the blood of a patient and heat it before putting it back into the body. The heated blood causes the patient’s body temperature to rise above 42 degrees Celsius. In people with AIDS, that increase in temperature kills some heat-sensitive HIV, the virus (病毒) that most doctors say causes AIDS.
Heating the blood of AIDS patients has been tried before. But during previous (以前的) attempts, the treatment caused deadly chemical changes in the blood. The BioLogic-HT System prevents those changes from happening, allowing the heat to kill viruses with few ill side effects.
Tests of BioLogic-HT treatment began on 36 patients earlier this year. The treatment takes about four hours, and the patient normally feels well enough to leave the hospital or clinic the following morning.
So far, the patients who have had the treatment say they feel better and have developed no new opportunistic infections (机会致病菌的感染). The patients also have experienced about a 50% increase in the number of T cells in their bodies. T cells are key disease-fighting cells of the immune (免疫的) system and the main target (目标) of HIV. The previous attempts to use high temperature for treating AIDS failed because they ______.