HIV Testing Rates Leveling Off
In 2006, 40.4 percent (71.5 million) of American adults said they had been tested for HIV at some time, a new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis finds..
About 10.4 percent of adults said they were tested for HIV in the preceding year. Of those, 83 percent were tested in a health care setting.
The analysis of National Health Interview Survey data shows that after several years of steady increases in HIV testing, rates leveled off between 2001 and 2006. The analysis was published Thursday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Early diagnosis of HIV infection is critical and can allow infected people to obtain life-extending medical treatment, the study's authors noted. Since 2006, the CDC has recommended that voluntary HIV screening become a routine part of medical care for all people between the ages of 13 and 64. More than 250,000 HIV-positive Americans don't know they're infected, the agency says.
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Health Premiums Have Doubled Since 1996
Since 1996, health insurance premiums for private-sector employers and their workers have increased more than 100 percent, according to the latest News and Numbers summary from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
The analysis of Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data also found that for U.S. employment-based health insurance between 1996 and 2006:
- The average cost of a family insurance plan increased from $4,954 to $11,381 a year, while the average cost for a single premium rose from $1,992 to $4,118.
- The bulk of the increases were paid for by employers. Their share increased from $3,679 to $8,491 a year for family coverage, and from $1,650 to $3,330 a year for single coverage.
- For workers, their share increased from $1,275 to $2,890 a year for family coverage and from $342 to $788 a year for single coverage.
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Remedial Instruction Helps Dyslexic Children
Remedial instruction can help improve dyslexia-related reading problems, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
The study of 25 grade five students who were poor readers found that 100 hours of remedial instruction increased activity in several areas of the brain, and those gains solidified over the following year, United Press International reported.
"This study demonstrates how remedial instruction can use the plasticity of the human brain to gain an educational improvement," senior author Marcel Just said in a news release. "Focused instruction can help underperforming brain areas to increase their proficiency."
The researchers also found evidence contradicting the common belief that dyslexia is primarily caused by problems with visual perception of letters, such as having trouble distinguishing between the letters "p" and "d". This kind of difficulty accounted for 10 percent of dyslexia cases in the study, while 70 percent of the children had problems relating the visual form of a letter to its sound, UPI reported.
The study appears in the journal Neuropsychologia.
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Procedure May Reduce Reliance on Anti-Rejection Drugs
A procedure that may limit transplant patients' reliance on powerful anti-rejection drugs has been developed by German researchers. Anti-rejection drugs can cause side effects and may not prevent the slow rejection of the new organ over time.
The new procedure involves mixing a patient's infection-fighting white blood cells with cells from the organ donor, in order to create specialized transplant acceptance-inducing cells (TAICs), which are injected into the transplant patient, BBC News reported.
Tests on 17 kidney transplant patients yielded promising results. In the first stage of clinical trials, 12 patients who received kidneys from deceased donors were given TAICs in addition to traditional anti-rejection drugs. Ten of the patients were gradually taken off a mix of anti-rejection drugs, and six eventually took only a low dose of a single drug.
In the second stage, five patients who received kidneys from live donors received TAICs before their transplant. One patient went eight months without any anti-rejection drugs and three others were successfully taken down to single low-dose therapy, BBC News reported.
The study appears in the journal Transplant International.
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Scientists Grow Rare Brain Cancer Cells
Canadian researchers who have cultivated cells from a rare and aggressive childhood brain cancer say this success may improve the chances of finding a treatment for atypical teratoid/rhaboid tumors (AT/RT). Until now, scientists hadn't been able to grow AT/RT cells in a petri dish.
"To do [drug] tests we need to have cancer cells in cultures. We take the cancer cells, add the targeted therapy [drug] agent and show whether it can kill or not kill," explained Dr. Aru Narendran, CBC News reported.
But, for an unknown reason, it had been impossible to grow AT/RT tumors outside the body. Narendran and colleagues were able to grow AT/RT cells by adding a small amount of brain fluid from an infant with the disease.
The University of Calgary researchers have already used cultivated AT/RT cells to test a drug that blocks a receptor that helps the tumor grow. The drug killed all the cancer cells, CBC News reported.
The findings were published in the Journal of Neuro-Oncology.
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Researchers Achieve Higher Cure Rate for Drug-Resistant TB
Aggressive drug treatment cured more than 60 percent of 48 patients in Peru with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) -- a success rate higher than that achieved in American and European hospitals. XDR-TB is resistant to the most effective drugs, CBC News reported.
Treatment of the patients in this study included a structured, comprehensive, community-based approach and aggressive use of TB drugs (an average of five or six medications per patient).
"It's essential that the world know that XDR-TB is not a death sentence. As or even more importantly, our study shows that effective treatment does not require hospitalization or indefinite confinement of patients," lead author Carole Mitnick, an instructor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in a new release, CBC News reported.
The study appears in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
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