Guidelines for the prevention and treatment of opportunistic infections in adults and adolescents with HIV

Developed by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the HIV Medicine Association of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Panel on Guidelines for the Prevention and Treatment of Opportunistic Infections in Adults and Adolescents with HIV\u2014A Working Group of the NIH Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council (OARAC).The Guidelines for the Prevention and Treatment of Opportunistic Infections in Adults and Adolescents with HIV document is published in an electronic format and updated as relevant changes in prevention and treatment recommendations occur.All changes are developed by the subject-matter groups listed in the document. (Changes in group composition also are posted promptly.) These changes are reviewed by the editors and by relevant outside reviewers before the document is altered.How to Cite the Adult and Adolescent Opportunistic Infection Guidelines: Panel on Guidelines for the Prevention and Treatment of Opportunistic Infections in Adults and Adolescents with HIV. Guidelines for the Prevention and Treatment of Opportunistic Infections in Adults and Adolescents with HIV. National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV Medicine Association, and Infectious Diseases Society of America. Available at https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/guidelines/adult-and- adolescent-opportunistic-infection. Accessed (insert date) [include page numbers, table number, etc., if applicable].Publication date from document properties.guidelines-adult-adolescent-oi.pd

Infection and propagation of hepatitis C virus in human CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T lymphocytes in vitro

Accumulated molecular and clinical evidence indicate that human immune cells can support replication of hepatitis C virus (HCV). The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of authentic, plasma-occurring HCV to infect human CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T lymphocytes in vitro. For this purpose, we adopted the previously established in vitro HCV replication system in total T cells derived from cultured normal human PBMC by employing affinity-purified CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T lymphocytes as targets. Using this system, we were able to demonstrate that molecularly intact HCV can infect and productively replicate in both CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T lymphocytes, albeit at low levels, by documenting: (1) Presence of HCV positive and replicative (negative) strands in infected cells; (2) Intracytoplasmic localization of viral proteins; (3) Emergence of new HCV variants in the de novo infected cells, and (4) Release of HCV RNA-reactive particles from the infected cells with biophysical properties distinct from those of virions in inocula used to infect these cells

Medical Microbiology, Virology & Immunology

УЧЕБНЫЕ ПОСОБИЯМИКРОБИОЛОГИЯВИРУСОЛОГИЯИММУНОЛОГИЯАЛЛЕРГОЛОГИЯ И ИММУНОЛОГИЯВ пособие включены разделы по общей микробиологии и медицинской иммунологии

Ultrasensitive detection of toxocara canis excretory-secretory antigens by a nanobody electrochemical magnetosensor assay.

peer reviewedHuman Toxocariasis (HT) is a zoonotic disease caused by the migration of the larval stage of the roundworm Toxocara canis in the human host. Despite of being the most cosmopolitan helminthiasis worldwide, its diagnosis is elusive. Currently, the detection of specific immunoglobulins IgG against the Toxocara Excretory-Secretory Antigens (TES), combined with clinical and epidemiological criteria is the only strategy to diagnose HT. Cross-reactivity with other parasites and the inability to distinguish between past and active infections are the main limitations of this approach. Here, we present a sensitive and specific novel strategy to detect and quantify TES, aiming to identify active cases of HT. High specificity is achieved by making use of nanobodies (Nbs), recombinant single variable domain antibodies obtained from camelids, that due to their small molecular size (15kDa) can recognize hidden epitopes not accessible to conventional antibodies. High sensitivity is attained by the design of an electrochemical magnetosensor with an amperometric readout with all components of the assay mixed in one single step. Through this strategy, 10-fold higher sensitivity than a conventional sandwich ELISA was achieved. The assay reached a limit of detection of 2 and15 pg/ml in PBST20 0.05% or serum, spiked with TES, respectively. These limits of detection are sufficient to detect clinically relevant toxocaral infections. Furthermore, our nanobodies showed no cross-reactivity with antigens from Ascaris lumbricoides or Ascaris suum. This is to our knowledge, the most sensitive method to detect and quantify TES so far, and has great potential to significantly improve diagnosis of HT. Moreover, the characteristics of our electrochemical assay are promising for the development of point of care diagnostic systems using nanobodies as a versatile and innovative alternative to antibodies. The next step will be the validation of the assay in clinical and epidemiological contexts

Core evidence elements for generating medicine safety evidence for pregnancy using population-based data: Recommendations from IMI-ConcePTION

Background: The risks and benefits of medicine use during pregnancy are typically established through post-approval population-based observational studies. Currently, there is heterogeneity in the identification, selection and the definitions of key pregnancy and maternal outcomes of interest, exposures, risk factors, and confounders. There is also a large range of different study designs and statistical tools available for these studies. Objectives: IMI-ConcePTION (https://www.imi-conception.eu/) identified the need to create recommendations for standardized key concepts and research methods. Methods: The core evidence elements guide for population-based observational studies was compiled using expertise in pharmacovigilance, pharmacoepidemiology, perinatal epidemiology, statistics, perinatal clinical pharmacology, and health services research, both internal and external to IMI-ConcePTION. It also included reviews of the literature, best practices, and regulatory guidance documents. Results: The recommendations cover core evidence elements including gestational age, exposures (dose/duration of medicine and etiological window); relevant confounders; pregnancy outcomes (live and non-live births), congenital anomalies, infant/childhood outcomes (including long-term outcomes), and maternal outcomes; research design considerations; analytical methods; statistical power/sample size considerations and study limitations. A list of “default” core evidence elements is also proposed as a minimal set of elements that should be considered in all pregnancy medicine safety surveillance studies. The recommendations also include guidance when assessing the quality of data sources. Conclusions: This core evidence elements recommendations will facilitate setting standards with regards to the definitions used in medicine and pregnancy studies, the quality of the data and the suitability of data sources used for this work. It can also be tailored to address studies with specific research questions, particular medicines/disease areas or specific outcomes. It will promote the conduct of more standardized, high quality and clinically meaningful population-based studies among pregnant women. It will also help with alignment across different studies to improve evidence synthesis

Medical-Data-Models.org:A collection of freely available forms (September 2016)

MDM-Portal (Medical Data-Models) is a meta-data repository for creating, analysing, sharing and reusing medical forms, developed by the Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Muenster in Germany. Electronic forms for documentation of patient data are an integral part within the workflow of physicians. A huge amount of data is collected either through routine documentation forms (EHRs) for electronic health records or as case report forms (CRFs) for clinical trials. This raises major scientific challenges for health care, since different health information systems are not necessarily compatible with each other and thus information exchange of structured data is hampered. Software vendors provide a variety of individual documentation forms according to their standard contracts, which function as isolated applications. Furthermore, free availability of those forms is rarely the case. Currently less than 5 % of medical forms are freely accessible. Based on this lack of transparency harmonization of data models in health care is extremely cumbersome, thus work and know-how of completed clinical trials and routine documentation in hospitals are hard to be re-used. The MDM-Portal serves as an infrastructure for academic (non-commercial) medical research to contribute a solution to this problem. It already contains more than 4,000 system-independent forms (CDISC ODM Format, www.cdisc.org, Operational Data Model) with more than 380,000 dataelements. This enables researchers to view, discuss, download and export forms in most common technical formats such as PDF, CSV, Excel, SQL, SPSS, R, etc. A growing user community will lead to a growing database of medical forms. In this matter, we would like to encourage all medical researchers to register and add forms and discuss existing forms

Smoking and Second Hand Smoking in Adolescents with Chronic Kidney Disease: A Report from the Chronic Kidney Disease in Children (CKiD) Cohort Study

The goal of this study was to determine the prevalence of smoking and second hand smoking [SHS] in adolescents with CKD and their relationship to baseline parameters at enrollment in the CKiD, observational cohort study of 600 children (aged 1-16 yrs) with Schwartz estimated GFR of 30-90 ml/min/1.73m2. 239 adolescents had self-report survey data on smoking and SHS exposure: 21 [9%] subjects had “ever” smoked a cigarette. Among them, 4 were current and 17 were former smokers. Hypertension was more prevalent in those that had “ever” smoked a cigarette (42%) compared to non-smokers (9%),