BACKGROUND The HIV-Brazil Cohort Study was established to analyze the effectiveness of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) and the impact of this treatment on morbidity, quality of life (QOL) and mortality. The study design, patients' profiles and characteristics of cART initiation between 2003 and 2010 were described. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Since 2003, the HIV-Brazil Cohort has...

BACKGROUND Despite the known substantial benefits of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), cumulative adverse effects could still limit the overall long-term treatment benefit. Therefore we investigated changes in the rate of death with increasing exposure to cART. METHODS A total of 12 069 patients were followed from baseline, which was defined as the time of starting cART or enrolment ...

Immunization studies with modified gp120 monomers using a hyperglycosylation strategy, in which undesired epitopes are masked by the selective incorporation of N-linked glycans, were described in a previous paper (Selvarajah S, et al., J Virol 2000;79:12148-12163). In this report, we applied the hyperglycosylation strategy to soluble uncleaved gp140 trimers to improve the antigenic and immunoge...

INTRODUCTION In the central nervous system, cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) 55-102 peptide is localized in areas, such as the ventral tegmental area, amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus, where emotional activity is regulated. Studies on the effects of the intracerebroventricular (ICV) administration of CART peptide on behavior remain limited. The findings from these stu...

The purpose of this study was to characterize the inhibitory modulation of cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) peptides, particularly with respect to the function of the D3 dopamine receptor (D3R), which is activated by its interaction with phosphorylated CaMKIIα (pCaMKIIα) in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). After repeated oral administration of caffeine (30 mg/kg) for five days, ...

This study aimed to evaluate plasma concentration of selected cancer-associated inflammatory and immune-modulated cytokines in HIV+ patients with advanced Kaposi sarcoma (KS), and to explore candidate biomarkers capable of predicting clinical outcome in response to chemotherapy (CT) plus combination antiretroviral therapy (cART).Thirty-seven plasma cytokines/chemokines were assessed by Luminex ...

Data mining technology is applied to extract the water supply operation rules in this study. Five characteristic attributes—reservoir storage water, operation period number, water demand, runoff, and hydrological year—are chosen as the dataset, and these characteristic attributes are applied to build a mapping relation with the optimal operation mode calculated by dynamic programming (DP). A Le...

BACKGROUND In treatment of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), high levels of adherence to combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) are required to prevent failure of virologic suppression, development of drug resistance, and permanent loss of therapeutic options. No published research has assessed the association between cART prescription cost sharing and adherence to cART. OBJECTIVE To ana...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW In general, the initiation of combination antiretroviral (cART) is associated with improvement in cognitive function. However, the impact of cART has on cognitive function in neurologically asymptomatic HIV-infected individuals initiating therapy at high CD4 lymphocyte cell counts is unknown. RECENT FINDINGS Cognitive function impairment remains prevalent despite effective c...

BACKGROUND Classification and regression tree (CART) models are tree-based exploratory data analysis methods which have been shown to be very useful in identifying and estimating complex hierarchical relationships in ecological and medical contexts. In this paper, a Bayesian CART model is described and applied to the problem of modelling the cryptosporidiosis infection in Queensland, Australia....