world health market 29

The results, featured in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper and highlighted in the bureau's latest Bulletin on Aging and Health, demonstrate for the first time how improving women's health can reduce cases of abuse by roughly 10 percent. "When these women who thought they were going to die realized this new treatment gave them many years to live, they faced stronger incentives to avoid abusive partners," said lead author Nicholas Papageorge, a Johns Hopkins economist. Previous research has shown a connection between poor health and domestic abuse, of which there are an estimated 4.5 million cases a year just in the United States. But until now researchers say no one has looked at whether improving women's health could change their likelihood of suffering domestic violence. To test this, Papageorge and his co-authors returned to a singular moment in health care history, the introduction in 1996 of HAART, or highly active antiretroviral the...

The research conducted by Swiss TPH is among the first longitudinal studies looking at the development of hypertension among people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. In a cohort of 955 HIV-infected people, 111 (11.6%) were hypertensive at the time of HIV diagnosis. An additional 80 people (9.6%) developed hypertension after starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) against HIV. The incidence of hypertension found in this study after ART initiation is more than 1.5 times higher than the one observed in a large multinational study of Europe, the United States and Australia. The study found that development of hypertension was not linked to the level of immunosuppression or any ART regimen in particular, but rather predicted by traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as age, body mass index and renal function. The effect of ART on body mass and the restoration of immunity are potential drivers of hypertension when under treatment. The study cohort included non-pregnant patient...

Specifically, they call for a shift in emphasis in drug development towards understanding how people differ in their response to pain medications to develop more precise, safer, and less addictive treatments. "Pain is a syndrome that is poorly understood and research on pain is poorly resourced relative to its preva¬lence and cost, especially in terms of shattered lives and lost productivity," writes Tilo Grosser, MD, an associate professor of Pharmacology, and Garret A. FitzGerald, MD, FRS, director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at Penn, along with Clifford J. Woolf, from the Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. This plan is especially urgent given no analgesic drugs directed at novel targets have been approved in the past five years. The authors reason that the opioid epidemic has attained the scale of the HIV/AIDS epidemic at its peak in the mid-1990s, and that a massive and diversified effort by multiple stakeholder...

Now, new research from The Rockefeller University and the National Institutes of Health suggests that treatment with two anti-HIV antibodies immediately after infection enables the immune system to effectively control the virus, preventing its return for an extended period. "This form of therapy can induce potent immunity to HIV, allowing the host to control the infection," says Michel Nussenzweig, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "It works by taking advantage of the immune system's natural defenses, similar to what happens in some forms of cancer immunotherapy." The research was conducted in macaque monkeys, using a model of HIV infection called simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV). Although this model does not precisely mimic human HIV infection, the findings suggest that immunotherapy should be explored as a way of controlling the virus and boosting an immune response that...

For their study, described March 8 in  PLOS Pathogens , the researchers used one of the largest libraries of naturally occurring HCV to rapidly sort out which mutations allow HCV to evade immune responses and found that mutations that occur outside of the viral sites typically targeted by such antibody responses play a major role in the virus' resistance. "We think those mutations could account for the difficulty of making an effective vaccine," says Justin Bailey, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. All told, the researchers compiled a library of 113 HCV strains from 27 patients with HCV infections followed at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. The researchers then tested each strain of the virus for susceptibility to two potent and commonly used antibodies in vaccine development experiments for HCV, HC33.4 and AR4A. Because natural HCVs do not thrive in the lab, the researchers first created pseudo-viruses us...

"A goal for an HIV-1 vaccine is to induce broadly neutralizing antibodies," said senior author Barton F. Haynes, M.D., director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI). "One strategy for the induction of these desirable antibodies is to find a way to develop a small portion of the envelope's structure that these desired antibodies recognize -- something we have now shown is possible." In the first of two papers published online March 15 in  Science Translational Medicine , Haynes and colleagues -- including lead author Mattia Bonsignori, M.D. of DHVI -- traced a series of events that led to the development of broadly neutralizing antibodies in an HIV infected person over the course of five years. The researchers found that the infected person's immune system responded to the virus with unusual, cooperative efforts between different B-cell lineages to induce broadly neutralizing antibodies. The antibody development process also involved acquisition...