CHICAGO (AP) - Hodgkin's disease and possibly two other types of cancer should be considered AIDS-defining diseases in HIV-positive patients, new research suggests.

The study examined more than 300,000 AIDS patients and their rates of several types of malignancies other than cancers already linked to the immune-suppressing disease.

AIDS patients were more than 11 times more likely to have Hodgkin's disease than people without AIDS, three times more likely to have lip cancer and about twice as likely to have a form of testicular cancer, the researchers reported in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study was led by Dr. Morten Frisch of the National Cancer Institute and the Danish Epidemiology Science Center.

Increased incidences of other malignancies, including lung and penis cancers, was attributed to lifestyle factors such as smoking and venereal disease rather than to AIDS.

In determining whether HIV-positive patients have developed full-blown AIDS, doctors consider whether they also have cancers known to occur when the AIDS virus has vigorously suppressed the body's disease-fighting immune system. The cancers already considered AIDS-defining diseases are cervical cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and a form of skin cancer known as Kaposi's sarcoma.

Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma are both cancers of the lymph glands, but they affect different cells.

Doctors have suspected that an increased incidence of Hodgkin's disease in AIDS patients stems from the disease's suppression of the immune system, said Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, a Cornell University researcher and adviser to the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

While the lip cancer-AIDS link wasn't as strong in the study, Laurence said an association makes sense since other research has found an increased lip-cancer risk in patients without AIDS whose immune systems are suppressed, such as transplant recipients.

The findings were suggestive but not definitive for a cancer of the testis called testicular seminoma, and previous research on the suspected link is sparse, the authors said.

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