A type of bacterium widely found on our skin and in the environment has now become a major threat in hospitals where it can cause serious infections, such as pneumonia in severely ill patients. Like the well known bacterium MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) the new types of Acinetobacter baumannii are resistant to nearly all antibiotics, so doctors have very few treatments available, and three resistant strains are currently circulating in the UK.
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A mutation in a little-studied structural region of the AIDS virus can cause resistance to several HIV drugs, according to a study. Several mutations in reverse transcriptase (RT), the viral enzyme that copies the genes of HIV, are already known to cause drug resistance and are routinely detected in blood tests used by physicians to individualize HIV treatment.
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A test commonly used to confirm HIV infection can also be used to calculate how many recent infections have occurred in a population, according to a new study. Diagnosing recent HIV infection usually involves special testing to detect antibodies produced early on in the course of infection. The researchers showed that analyzing data already available from an antibody test routinely used to confirm HIV infection in Switzerland can accurately estimate the proportion of people who became infected within the previous 12 months.
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“We have unequivocally observed that CMV retinitis is causing blindness in a young population in developing countries, even though the full scope of the problem remains to be defined,” says an international team of 14 eye doctors, HIV specialists, and medical and humanitarian aid workers. Cytomegalovirus (CMV), a member of the herpesvirus family, was a familiar cause of blindness and death in patients with advanced AIDS in Western countries prior to the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). In the era before HAART, about 1/3 of patients with AIDS in the West suffered potentially blinding CMV retinitis.
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Coffee is an effective countermeasure to sleepiness for both young and middle-aged people. However, napping is more efficient in young than in middle-aged people.
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The most common factors believed to contribute to diabetes are a decreased amount of physical activity and access to highly palatable processed foods. However, there is growing evidence that another aspect of our modern lifestyle, short sleep duration, is also contributing toward the “diabetes epidemic.”
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In an examination of potential relationships between objective sleep measures, nocturnal sex hormone levels, and the nocturnal course of body temperature of older postmenopausal women, a new study finds that altered levels of both sex hormones and gonadotropins may contribute to sleep disturbance in older postmenopausal women and confirm the results of previous studies indicating that higher body temperature is associated with poorer sleep quality.
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Women die and get infections more often than men after heart surgery because they tend to receive more blood transfusions, which boost the risks of bad outcomes, according to a new study.
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DNA methylation has been directly proven in mice to promote the development of colon tumors, and to target specific regions of DNA rather than being distributed at random. Growing understanding of this process is a promising pathway to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of certain cancers with minimal side effects.
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Even after more than a year of maintaining a normalized body weight, young women with past anorexia nervosa show vastly different patterns of brain activity compared to similar women without the eating disorder. Studying these differences in brain function could lead to a better understanding of why some young women are at greater risk of developing the disorder.
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