In a pilot single blind study, beta-carotene (BC) supplementation produced, in ARC patients under current treatment, apparent recovery from asthenia, fever, nocturnal sweating, diarrhoea, lass in weight, and led as a result to an improvement in general health and working efficiency, but not to an improvement in multiple district lympho-adenopathies. Nevertheless, BC appeared to prevent progress to AIDS and, in addition, to lower the effective dosage of AZT used in one case of ARC developed into AIDS, producing a recovery from opportunistic infections and an inhibition of Kaposi sarcoma diffusion, in line with a two-fold rise in CD4 counts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]