HIV and ID Observations

June 19th, 2011

Abacavir Agonistes

The studies on abacavir and its potential association with increased cardiovascular risk have been inconsistent ever since the news first broke at CROI 2008. But recently the data have been swirling around so fast and furious that it seems appropriate to take out this famous Greek epithet. A summary of some recent notable studies: An FDA meta-analysis […]

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June 15th, 2011

Hockey Helicobacters

Today’s ID/HIV items come to you courtesy of a winter game being played during a summer month: So it appears that community-based care of HCV augmented by telemedicine is just as good as traditional clinic visits to specialists. My first thought on reading this important paper is that there are undoubtedly lots of ways to incorporate […]

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June 2nd, 2011

Original XMRV/CFS Paper Almost, Sort-of Retracted by Science

From the pages of Science In this week’s edition of Science Express, we are publishing two Reports that strongly support the growing view that the association between XMRV and CFS described by Lombardi et al. likely reflects contamination of laboratories and research reagents with the virus … Because the validity of the study by Lombardi et al. is […]

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May 12th, 2011

HPTN 052 Results — Another Win for Early HIV Therapy

The results of the HPTN Study 052 — which randomized 1,763 serodiscordant couples to early vs delayed ART to evaluate whether this reduced the risk of HIV transmission — have just been released: Findings from the study were reviewed by an independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) …The DSMB concluded that initiation of ART by HIV-infected […]

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May 9th, 2011

Routine Screening for Anal Cancer: Are We There Yet?

A paper recently published in AIDS evaluated the cost effectiveness of various strategies for anal cancer screening in HIV positive men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM). The “bottom line” (ahem): In HIV-infected MSM, the direct use of high resolution anoscopy is the most cost-effective strategy for detecting anal intraepithelial neoplasia Over on our Journal Watch AIDS Clinical Care site, Tim Wilkin from […]

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April 28th, 2011

Hepatitis C Week is Upon Us

After many — and I mean many — years of telling patients that new hepatitis C drugs were “coming soon,” that time has finally come. An FDA Advisory Panel yesterday favorably reviewed the HCV protease inhibitor boceprevir; today telaprevir got the same unanimous report. The FDA will  certainly follow with approval for both drugs, and hence […]

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April 25th, 2011

FEM-PrEP: A Set Back in HIV Prevention Research

HIV prevention has been on such a roll recently that the recent negative news from the FEM-PrEP study came as something of a surprise.  Bottom line: Following a scheduled interim review of the FEM-PrEP study data, the Independent Data Monitoring Committee (IDMC) advised that the FEM-PrEP study will be highly unlikely to be able to demonstrate […]

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April 18th, 2011

When to Start Antiretroviral Therapy, Take 3

A third observational study on “When to Start ART” has just appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine,  “The HIV-CAUSAL Collaboration.” As with ART-CC and NA-ACCORD, it’s a large study, starting with over 20,000 people with HIV with baseline CD4s >500 receiving care in Europe and the United States.  Out of this group, 8392 experienced CD4 […]

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April 11th, 2011

Organ Transplants from HIV-Infected Donors

On the heels of last month’s report of HIV transmission from an organ donor — covered here in Journal Watch — comes this remarkable article in the New York Times about lifting the ban on organ donation from donors known to be HIV positive. Naturally, the first group of patients slated to receive these HIV positive […]

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April 9th, 2011

And Now, for a More Comprehensive CROI Report …

Although I’ve already provided a Really Rapid Review™ of the 18th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), the editors of Journal Watch/AIDS Clinical Care have put together a more comprehensive summary here. I sometimes wonder what research from these conferences will not only stand the test of time, but will grow in importance and […]

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